@thombenjamin due to the age of some of these lessons, there are a few places where code examples don't work (very few TBH) due to you how you've got your local machine set up.
I tend to note those down (solve later) and the skip along to another lesson, after perhaps reporting the issue you're having in the comments under the lesson or raising an issue in the GitHub repo that accompanies laracasts at https://github.com/laracasts
When I started with Laravel it was at the point when there was a version jump and so a lot of the tutorials on the web were difficult to follow.
I've been using PHP since version 3 so cant really point you to some good novice tutorials on the web, but would recommend the tutorials on laracasts around Object-Oriented Principles, SOLID and testing.
Keep churning the tutorials and reading the forum and post about anything you are having trouble with. Noone will object to questions - we all had to learn somewhere.