Learning PHP from Laravel?

@RobertN Personally, I feel it’s a bit disingenuous to take a job as a back-end developer if you don’t know anything about ‘coding’. It’s like me taking a job as a junior accountant and saying, “I know spreadsheets. I’ll pick the rest up on the way.” I hope you were taken on in this role under the understanding there would be a grace period of you learning the required skills for the job.

Back to your actual question though, you’re better off learning the language PHP. If you learn Laravel, you’re learning a framework only and those skills won’t be transferrable. Whereas if you learn the language, you’ll be able to then pick up frameworks written in that language a lot easier.

In a previous role, I’d interviewed people for a PHP developer role. There was a simple PHP test (take an all-uppercase string and make it title case). A couple of candidates failed because they had just made websites in CodeIgniter (this was a while back) so outside of CodeIgniter, so they were lost when it came to solving a trivial PHP problem.

It might be useful to learn by thinking to yourself 'how would I do this without laravel?'. For instance how would you build a Request object? How would you build up your objects without it's container? Look at some of the helper functions and see how you'd implement them yourself.

That way you gradually learn the underlying PHP things as you're learning more about the framework.

There are also more bare-bones frameworks like slim that might help you learn more and see different approaches to familiar problems.

Completely agree with @ohffs.

You can build a basic router in 10 lines or so of PHP.

You could build super basic DI container in probably 30 - 50.

You need to figure out the principles behind the classes, then build it using PHP.

And again, totally agreed with picking up other frameworks! Laravel is only one way to do things.

Writing your own packages / plugins is the best of both worlds in my view - you leverage the framework to get the wider functionality, but your package will solve Problem X, the functions are the API, and the content is raw PHP.

Good luck; it's loads of fun :)

I don't really worry about losing my raw PHP, this feels like the way the world is changing.

Frameworks are part of the evolution of PHP development.

What's the point reinventing the wheel, if you don't have to?

Mick

@phpMick There’s a difference between utilising a framework, and limiting to yourself to a framework. Not ‘really [worrying] about losing [your] raw PHP’ is a very narrow-minded—and scary—outlook to have. Knowing the language underneath a framework has all kinds of benefits. A comparison is the awful jQuery code written by developers who don’t have a basic understanding of JavaScript.

A lot of good and amazing points!

@martinbean I feel yeah, recently interviewing devs for a expanding start up and most couldn't tell me the difference between for loop and foreach loop in code.

Personally I tend to lean towards pure php over helpers in some cases. Look at the Form Helpers, you call a php class and method to out put html:

Form::close();

public function close()
{
    return '</form>';
}

Why not just save time, energy and performance by ''. Obviously all the helpers do the same thing, though some are more complicated then others, but the point is the same.

I think the most important thing is if you can figure it out on your own. Be able to understand the PHP manual and read docs. Understanding how it works as Jeffery tries to show us in his videos is a good way to learn too. How do you handle something with no helper? How do you handle when the helper has limitations and doesn't fit your exact needs? Laravel is great and arguably covers 90% if requirements to some degree but nothing can be 100% as each use case is different.

You should focus more on Raw PHP and Object Oriented Programming with PHP because that's the main thing you will probably do most of the time. Sure Laravel has some helpers, but you'll have a hard time with a big project which has to be extended in the future. You'll probably end up rewriting the code if you don't know how to organize it in different classes, files, and folders from the start.