Laravel Introduction

This Laravel tutorial series describes the various features of Laravel and guides you to learn the Laravel PHP framework to make web development easier.

If you are familiar with Core PHP and Advanced PHP, Laravel will make your task easier. It saves a lot time if you are planning to develop a website from scratch. Moreover, a website built in Laravel is secure and prevents several web attacks.

Note: This tutorial will guide the developers and students who want to learn how to develop a website using Laravel.

1 - Required Knowledge

Before you start proceeding with this tutorial, we assume that you are familiar with HTML, Core PHP, and Advance PHP. If you are new to any of these concepts, we suggest you to pick tutorials based on these concepts first, to gain a better understanding of Laravel.

Before learning Laravel, it would be helpful to have a good understanding of the following concepts:

• PHP: Laravel is built on top of the PHP programming language, so having a solid understanding of PHP is essential. This includes concepts such as variables, arrays, loops, functions, and object-oriented programming. If you want to learn PHP, please visit our PHP Tutorial.
• HTML and CSS: Laravel is a web application framework, so you'll need to have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS to build the front end of your application.
• SQL: Laravel uses a database to store and retrieve data, so you'll need a basic understanding of SQL and how to interact with a database using PHP.
• MVC architecture: Laravel follows the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern, which divides an application into three components: the model, the view, and the controller. It's essential to understand the role of each component in an MVC application.
• Composer: PHP Composer is a dependency management tool for PHP. Laravel uses Composer to manage its dependencies, so you'll need to be familiar with how to use Composer to install and update packages.
• Git: Laravel uses Git for version control, so it's helpful to have a basic understanding of how to use Git to track changes to your codebase.
• Basic Linux commands: Laravel is typically deployed to a Linux server, so having a basic understanding of Linux commands will be helpful when setting up and managing your Laravel application.

It is also good to have a general understanding of web development concepts and techniques, such as HTTP, routing, and security.

2 - Some Facts About Laravel

• Taylor Otwell developed Laravel in July 2011, and it was released more than five years after the release of the Codeigniter framework.
• Laravel is a PHP-based web framework like Codeigniter.
• Laravel is one of the open-source PHP frameworks.
• Laravel follows the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern.
• Laravel is one of the most popular PHP frameworks after Codeigniter.

3 - Features of Laravel

Some essential features provided by Laravel are:

• Routing controllers.
• Configuration management.
• Testability.
• Authentication and authorization of users.
• Modularity.
• ORM (Object Relational Mapper) features.
• Provides a template engine.
• Building schemas.
• E-mailing facilities.

We will learn more features of Laravel in further chapters.