Becoming an expert Laravel Developer

• Just start with https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-from-scratch-2017
• Make your own app
• Do some other tutorials
• Dive into the (core) code
• Try to solve some forum questions

You have to challenge yourself to level up. With challenge I mean invest time to:

• Try new things you've never built/used before
• Read books/articles/tutorials/opinions
• Take online/offline courses
• Dig into the framework and instead of just using some functions/methods because they work, try to look at why/how they work, pick 1-2 things every day you should look deep into and fully understand
• Help other people! This is one of the best methods I used, I figured I can learn a lot by help solving other people's problems, and at the same time help people = win/win ☺
• Find people who also code, it can be on social media, forums, chats (slack), meetups, school, office, etc. It's great to have people to bounce ideas off.
• Learn PHP if you haven't already
• Learn SOLID https://laracasts.com/series/solid-principles-in-php

All in all, it's like everything else, it takes a lot of time (years and years) to master.

in addition to what @mvd mentioned...

• https://laracasts.com/series/object-oriented-bootcamp-in-php
• https://laracasts.com/series/solid-principles-in-php
• https://laracasts.com/series/whip-monstrous-code-into-shape

• Discipline yourself. Programming is part art, part constant discipline.
• Make programming fun. Do fun stuff, e.g. try to make a game or something that you would want to use every day, e.g. a todo list app. Start with a simple project and keep on building from there.
• Make sure you set goals. I was a medium programmer but I was dying to become better. I started doing Laracasts about a year ago but I am forcing myself to do every single lesson so that I can improve
• Balance the rest of your life too. Although programming can be fun it can consume all your time so make sure you have other distractions to keep you sane.

Remember, this is a long term investment. Try and imagine where you want to be in six months, in a year, in two years, in five, etc.

my code is just not good enough

Don't get hung up on thinking like this. Code is disposable. Easily replaceable. Focus on solving problems and just build stuff. Take constructive criticism and ignore the rest.

Remember that everything is hard before it's easy.

@alenabdula Those are very good resources and Ill be visiting and revisiting each and every one of them as @eugenevdm has pointed out. Not only me but I hope someone caught up in a similar dilemma stumbles upon them.

• Read more code.
• Figure more things out using the API and the source code rather than google/stackoverflow.
• Use another framework for a project (I'd recommend Symfony as you can easily install it on homestead or valet).
• Get people to review your code.

Simple code is not necessarily bad and might often be better than something that is over-engineered.

Also some of these links might be helpful

I have a "dummy" app that I've been rebuilding from scratch, over and over. I have no intention of it ever seeing the light of day, it's purely for practice. I've been doing this for about 2 years now, and I'm probably on build #15 by now. With each iteration, I add more and more features, yet the code is getting simpler and easier to understand.

There is so much to learn, and it changes so fast. I think if you ever finish a project and don't think you could have done it better, you're in trouble.

@Kisiara Read code. Write code. There really is no “trick” to becoming a better developer other than practice. Like any other skill, the more you practice it the better you become.

The documentation should be your bible for Laravel 5/5.1.

The documentation contains almost everything that you would need to get started with Laravel.

www.laravel.com/docs/5.1

Next, you would need a forum to broadcast your problem and wait for the experts to answer.

www.laravel.io www.laracasts.com/discuss www.stackoverflow.com

Now, what if I tell you that you an even learn Laravel from a man crowned as PHP's killer feature i.e. Jeffrey Way.

You would have seen tutorials and screencasts before, but it won't be exaggerating if I said that Jeffrey Way at Laracasts provides the best screencasts for Laravel developers.

www.laracasts.com

Here, you can easily learn Laravel, PHP, JavaScript etc. and it won't be intimidating at all.

Happy Coding :)

Next, to the great tips above here, what helped me a lot was understanding better how Laravel works under the hood. There were a lot of parts of Laravel that felt like "magic" and actually this is a good thing when you start learning Laravel because you can learn fast. But the more you know about how Laravel works, the more comfortable you will feel while using it. On the way, you will also learn a lot by looking at great solutions/implementations by awesome coders like Taylor and other contributors.

So I would recommend digging into the core or checking my Laravel Core Adventures course. There a lot of free videos available as well. I admit this is also shameless advertising for my content, but it is still true and learning these things helped me a lot on my way.