I'm studying in university to become IT-engineer and I decided to do thesis using Laravel as my topic. Being a real web developer would be my dream, but my school isn't really teaching anything but the very basics of web development so I have to study by my self.

I have made couple of working websites and know the basics of PHP, CSS, HTML, MySQL and few other programming languages but nothing that much. I now decided that I want to learn how to use PHP frameworks, and decided to try out Laravel after some small research I did.

However, after hours and hours of trying to set up laravel I'm constantly getting stuck and I really have no idea what to do anymore. I first tried installing laravel to my shell (I have shell account which I can use to upload my projects etc.) but I just never got it to work and get it started so I gave up.

Now later I decided to give it a new try, and I spend 3 hours trying to get it to work on Windows 7 but I soon found out that it's really not easy to set it up on windows because all the Laracast guides for examples are made for some other environments so I constantly got stuck in small problems I really didn't know answer to. I first installed WAMP, then composer and laravel few times in differend places following guides and when I realised I really dont know how to make them work like guides told me I decided to try other approach and tried to install Laravel homestead (following homestead 2.0 guide in laracast) and installed Virtual box (I have some small experience with virtual box because of my school) and GIT (I don't really understand idea of GIT just yet) and even tho I tried following guides as close as possible, I just never really installed it cleanly because I got some error message that didn't occure in the guide I was following. Some errors I found answer and could fix, (Like some files were missing in current laravel build or something, so I had to recreate them)...

So now, I feel like I should just start all over again, either using my Shell again or trying to get it work in windows envinronment but I'd really like to get some help this time so if I end up getting stuck again or having questions I could just clear them up pretty much asap.

Should I use my shell or just do it on windows? Any tips how I could start fresh or what guide should I follow?

Anyone that could coach / mentor me? (Skype chat would be best for that, I like instant messaging).

Edit: I forgot to add that I'm supposed to do small project / report using Laravel before 17th day this month, so this is kinda urgent!