Overwhelmed by learning Web Development

I would say set up a basic system in Laravel and get to the point where you can do basic crud. When you feel a little comfortable with that then perhaps interject and update with AJAX. And basically go from there taking little small steps at a time. But definitely start with just laravel with no Ajax at first. Remember, the same methods that are used to update a record are also used in Ajax to update a record.
Edit:
Hint, if you get stuck on something of course ask a question here. But please remember to do a forum search first, there are many answered questions already. Things like authentication, pagination, a one-to-many relationship, and things of that nature has been answered many times already.
Yes another edit:
Don't forget the Basic laracast series to get you started out. I bet @bashy can't top this answer. But somehow he probably will.

Awesome! Thanks for the help. Maybe I will just dive into Laravel then.

And I usually use search functions all the time. But I think that my question was a little bit different (more personal) than all other "learn web development" related questions. :)

Heck, I used program in Java and Servlets but when I first started to use laravel I did not know what trait was, but learned how to use it properly on the forum. The laravel cmmunity is a very helpful bunch of folks, we disagree sometimes, but we stick together.

I need to learn Java in about a few months at school, but because I have a passion for web development I will surely keep doing it in my free time. That's also one of the reasons why I want to learn as much as possible, so I could transfer most of my programming knowledge over to Java.

@JeanPierree to see how we stick together read and enjoy this https://laracasts.com/discuss/channels/laravel/laravel-is-a-giant-waste-of-time

@jlrdw Hahaha, awesome!

I think a lot of these folks are so friendly because they are mac users and I've heard that mac users are more friendly than PC users. Just kidding here but someone on another post mentioned that one time.

When I first started learning I would take an open source project, rip it apart and figure out how it all worked and tied together. It helped me a lot. A quick search brought these up for laravel. Enjoy!

https://gist.github.com/msurguy/8590765

Yeah, I've heard a lot of people saying that breaking and fixing an existing project is a great way to learn. I've bookmarked that link, thanks!

Hey @JeanPierree congratulations on your progress so far, this stuff is tough. Have you seen Jeffrey's Laracon 2015 presentation https://laracasts.com/lessons/jeffrey-way-laracon-2015-presentation ? at around 8:19 he talks about how writing software is hard and delivers a list of all the supposed skills a web developer should have in a comedic way.

The point is, not to make you feel bad about all the stuff you "should" know, but just to accept that it takes time and that you will never stop learning. You only have to Google "Impostor syndrome" to see that lots of developers with many many years of experience still have doubts about their abilities. There's a Laracon talk about that as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtrF5C7Gv7E

My advice would be to build something from scratch that will be useful to you. Perhaps a catalog of your music/videos/games or a simple CMS or something else. Start simple but if it's something useful to you then you will be motivated to develop it further. Then make it mobile friendly or add ajax or a rest api or whatever. It may not be the greatest code in the world but that's ok. Make it work and then review it and see how it could be made better. See if you can find a code mentor, either online or in real life. You may be able to find one at your local PHP/(Laravel?) meetup group if you have one nearby. As mentioned above, people often like helping others.

Good luck, we'll be here on the forum waiting for your questions ;-)

@robgeorgeuk Thanks for such an encouraging post! Right now, I am now building a small application with an own backend (cms-like) where users can register to rent cars from other users. Pretty much like a community-driven car rental service. I am doing this project from scratch the object oriented way in collaboration with a friend using GitHub. Learning a lot from in though! After this project, I wil definitely dive into Laravel and just start learning things on the go as I am learning/mastering Laravel. :)

As for Jeffrey's talk, very inspiring!

Let me add one thing, you don't have to learn all that specialize junk to be a web developer. I would say learn html good, learn PHP, some JavaScript, and some basic CSS to start with. I myself do not use bootstrap I write my own CSS and do just fine. Don't let people push libraries on you that you might not even need. That's not to say you can't use bootstrap if you want to, but its not necessary to have a good website.
Just don't get trapped by following the latest fad. It seems as though if the latest thing was going and jumping off a 100 foot cliff a lot of these people would do that. Well not me.