Is it me or Laravel is really hard to tame for beginners?

You have to start slow and realize there's a learning curve. and just don't try to learn too much too fast, take your time and learn correctly.

And there are code samples on GitHub that you can study.

I have been a software developer for a long time but had not worked with PHP at all and until recently didn't even know of Laravel. I found the following video series and by the time I was done I was in good shape.

This is on the DevMarketer youtube channel - Called build a blog with Laravel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8B4og-BeCk&list=PLwAKR305CRO-Q90J---jXVzbOd4CDRbVx&index=1

After following this series I was prepared for Jeff's more focused and advanced videos.

@DALMA - Thank you so much!

This series is long but it builds step by step. I followed the entire series and then have viewed about another 100 posted on here and with each I was able to grow in my understanding.

@alekseyio Personally, I think one of the benefits of having Jeff show different methods of doing certain tasks is that you learn the long way and then he leads up to the shorter way, and often times, the "best practice" to handle that task. This can be helpful, since just about every developer is going to have a different way of approaching certain tasks. When reading code from other developers, this can definitely be a big positive.

I am not new to php, or server side programming, but by no means am I an expert. I think the way Jeff goes through his tutorials can be frustrating at times, just like you. But I have found that if you, as he says, "come along for the ride" it all starts to make sense.

First, the documentation is... well, it's awful (at least for me)

I'm baffled every time I hear this. Laravel has the best framework documentation I've ever seen.

In one vid Jeff says "k, we need to create a new task, well then, let's create an instance, assign every property and then just call save() method, it's that simple! Let's continue in the next...", the next vid: "remember how we did it? well there is a better way and blabla..", the following vid: "in the previous vid we did this, BUT, there is a BETTER approach".

Sorry to hear you're not a fan of that approach, but I think it's vital. I find that newcomers often want to skip ahead to the "right way" shortcut. I don't think that's useful. It creates dogmatic developers.

It's like learning an instrument. If you only learn how to play a particular melody in one position, how is that useful to your future arrangements? It's not. The key is to learn how to play the melody all over the neck, in multiple positions. That's what I'm trying to do with these lessons. "Here's one way to create and save the task. But here's another approach you can reach for." You need to learn both if you want to actually learn how the framework works.

@JEFFREYWAY - Wow, never thought I'd get a response from you.

You are totally correct that in coding there are tons of different ways in order to accomplish a given task.

I've spent a week or two learning Laravel via your videos, reading documentation and other articles on the internet. And to be honest, what annoys me the most is that this framework does too much for you under the hood and I feel really uncomfortable doing certain things that I could do manually (e.g. fetching a single record from the database) with a few additional lines of code.

Anyway, I understand that this thread is meaningless and I just wanted to get some feedback on how to proceed next.

@JEFFREYWAY - I find Laravel documentation much better than cakephp.

As I use cakephp and yii2 at times.

But not to worry laravel is my favorite, Taylor made very flexible and easy to use.

I usually learn a lot from the vendor folder how Taylor did things.

And digging through the API.

I use the out-of-the-box Authentication however I wrote my own helpers to work with roles. Basically I have my own RBAC.

I suggest anyone new to follow Taylor's out of the box way of doing things until they learn the framework well.

Eventually you get to the point where you know how to write custom helpers, etc.

Also suggest to watch your introductory videos and any other video that will help them.

And I remind them like you reminded me once we were all new to this at one time.

@Alekseyio facing the same issue as yours, finding it damn difficult to learn laravel somehow i understood routing,controllers,blade,syntax,functions,query builder but this eloquent man what is this? i started learning it i got to know laravel has default methods here illuminate\support\collection which we can used in eloquent as eloquent overridden them here illuminate\database\eloquent\collection and this illuminate\database\eloquent\collection have some methods of its own but other then this there are other methods too which operated on query model i dont know but what i know is php and still i dont know how to learn laravel. its too much complex documentation seriously

Old post, but for anyone landing here, go through the learning curve.

For example you don't go from basic high school math to advanced analytic geometry and calculus in a week.

Same thing.

hmmm thanks guyz.