Introduction To Laravel — Why Laravel?
Laravel is a PHP development library built on top of Symfony. Laravel offers a lot of neat features, such as:
Easy Database Connection
Facilitates the Validation Process
Configurable Templates and Controls
Advanced Routing Methods
Email Configuration, Queues, and More!
Challenges With Using Laravel As a Newbie
The biggest problem when getting started with a new programming language library is knowing where to start. Laravel provides a huge amount of helpful documentation, but there is also a lot of incorrect information floating around. I have read so many blogs about how to create a blog with Laravel that are wrong, or at least don’t make sense.
In the past I was guilty of this myself, and would rely on resources like Stack Overflow for answers. Now that I’ve been working with Laravel for three years, I have found that Stack Overflow is full of the correct answers to many problems, but can be slow if you’re unlucky enough to get a question answered by the “wrong” answer.
Despite this challenges, Laravel has been developed by a group of smart minds under the leadership of Taylor Otwell, and its documentation offers almost all answers needed to build a sizable web application with it.
I would advise for example searching the documentation first on laravel.com before using Stack Overflow. Also as a tip, I would encourage reviewing Laracast answers as there are more precise to those on Stack Overflow most of the time.
How Long It Takes To Learn Laravel
It takes a short period of time to learn Laravel if you have previous experience with Object Oriented Programming PHP (OOP). I was able to get moving with Laravel within a Week of Evening studies and tutorials on YouTube. I would recommend checking out Laravel Daily.
However as you scale the size of your applications, usability and functionality you will discover just like any other framework, your on a learning experience for life.
Laravel Usage Areas —Multi-platform Applications
Laravel can be used for multiple purposes including building cross platform mobile applications while feeding on its API built routing. You will however need to learn React Native, or Flutter to build the mobile version. Laravel therefore is not limited to Web Applications only.
Final Notes
This is an introduction a multi-series of why I use Laravel Framework. Read my other articles as an extension of my thoughts on Laravel, its applications, and my journey of using it to build core products. I will cover the pro and cons of using Laravel on my next article.
See you soon
