A little over a month ago, I started toying around with other PHP Frameworks besides my first love, CodeIgniter. I was familiar with Kohana, because of its CI ties, and I tried out Yii and even micro-frameworks like Slim. Then, somewhere in my Twitter stream, I came across a tutorial for Laravel from a site by Dayle Rees. There was also talk of an impending book release based on those tutorials, and when it was released, I happily bought a copy of Code Happy. And while it could just be effective mind-control marketing on their part, I really did find it fun to learn and code. So the following are some tutorials that helped me along the way to learning about Laravel…
If you want to get up-and-running quickly, even without previous framework experience, I can’t recommend this book enough. The minimum price is $5, but if you don’t give at least $10, you’re a big, stupid jerk. Seriously. There’s already been an update to Laravel, and he updated the book almost immediately after… and once you buy it, you get the updates for free. Beyond the fact that this is an immensely helpful book, people need to support this publishing model.
You can also find most of the material on his blog, if you want to see what you’re getting.
He caused a bit of an “uproar” over his Codeigniter is dead post, but his Laravel tutorials are top-notch. And screencasts to boot… which are always cool. The controllers and routes tutorials are great for beginners, and get you started making sites pretty quickly. I just watched his Form Model screencast, and I’m eager to try out that bundle.
The Official Laravel Screencasts
There aren’t a whole lot of these, but they serve as a great introduction to the framework. If you want to get acquainted with the Eloquent ORM, there are some good videos… and I found the overview of the Blade templating system to be informative.
There’s some more overview/getting started stuff here, but also a couple of more in-depth tutorials. The Advanced Validation lesson is very nice, and is something I’ve begun to implement myself.
Not so much tutorials, but he blogs about Laravel and uses it for his job. I subscribe to his blog for his links to other Laravel (and Codeigniter) resources and occasional commentary.
This is a very young framework, but the documentation is very well done and extensive. One of the reason I love PHP and Codeigniter is because they are both well documented, and if I have a question about a method, or the order of arguments for a function, I know exactly where to go. Laravel has taken this notion to heart right from the beginning. And if you can’t find your answer there, the forums are a great place to ask your question. In fact, the guys that did these tutorials are frequently the ones to answer questions… so you’d be getting expert advice.
So eventhough Laravel is probably one of the youngest PHP frameworks, it seems to be gaining a lot of steam very quickly. People love it even if they don’t plan on using it. So hopefully, this list will only expand as more people jump on board.