Techno of the week – Laravel

Whether you’re a solo developer or a 20 person team, Laravel is a breath of fresh air. Keep everyone in sync using Laravel’s database agnostic migrations and schema builder.” This would be the motto of Laravel.

Laravel is a free, open source, PHP framework. It was created for the web artisans by Taylor Otwell, a .NET developer from Arkansas. When? Well, its 1st beta release was made in June, 2011. Now it is one of the most popular PHP frameworks together with Zend, and Codelgniter, even if it started as a last mentioned extension. Last version, 5.5, was launched in August 2017.

Why so popular?

The framework’s community says that it keeps a developer happy from download to deploy. Why? Well, let’s list only 5 of its strong points:
1. Excellent Documentation
2. Laracasts
3. Intuitive Syntax
4. Practical Application Structure
5. Artisan Code Generation

See all the reasons and explanations here.

Where to learn it

Perhaps more important than anything else is the fact that Laravel gathered an army of evangelists from the PHP community. There are plenty of resources to learn from:
1. You can get the official documentation from here: https://laravel.com/docs/5.5
2. Laracasts, also known as the Netflix of your career, was brought to life by Jeffrey Way, an important pillar of the Laravel community. The platform focuses on the most concise screencasts to help you choose the best approaches when developing in Laravel.
3. Books: Code Bright by Dale Rees & Laravel Up & Running by Matt Stauffer (pure gold for beginners)

If you know other useful resources, share them with us in the comments bellow.

Laravel Conferences – where developers go to learn, grow and mingle

Laracon Europe
(find all the presentations from last year on Laracon EU 2016 Youtube Channel)

And Laracon US.
We were excited to discover the entire video collection with all the presentations from Laracon US (July 25-26, NY). Fresh, awesome, good quality and Taylor Otwell was there.

Assess your Laravel skills

If you are already a Laravel artisan, we suggest taking this test. At the end you’ll receive a Certificate to enrich your LinkedIn profile. Do not hesitate to drop us a line or two. Your feedback would be like a summer holiday in our Inbox.

This article is part of a new series called “Techno of the week”. Next week: React.JS