Before we get started, come along for a quick two minute overview of the MVC architecture. MVC stands for "Model, View, Controller" and is the bedrock for building Laravel applications.

I hope you're excited. It's time to dig in. Now, as for prerequisites, you'll need access to a good editor, a terminal, and of course PHP and MySQL. We'll also need to get a tool called Composer installed on your machine.

It's very cool that we can whip up a fresh Laravel application by using composer create-project; however, there's an even simpler option that allows you to type laravel new project and, bam, you're up and running. In this episode, let's install it globally on our machine.

Extra Credit: Install Laravel Valet to make any new Laravel project accessible via http://app-name.test.

Let's begin with the basics. If you load the home page for any new Laravel app in the browser, you'll see a basic "welcome" splash page. In this lesson, we'll figure out how a route "listens" for a URI and then loads a view (or HTML) in response.

Now that we understand how a particular URI ultimately loads a piece of HTML, let's now figure out how to include some generic CSS and JavaScript assets.

The simplest form of our blog will surely consist of a list of blog post excerpts, which then individually link to a different page that contains the full post. Let's begin working toward that goal.

Before we reach for a database, let's discuss how to store each blog post within its own HTML file. Then, in our routes file, we can use a route wildcard to determine which post needs to be fetched and passed to the view.

Sometimes, you'll wish to limit a route wildcard to only a certain sequence or pattern of characters. Luckily, Laravel makes this a cinch. In this episode, we'll add a constraint to our route to ensure that the blog post slug consists exclusively of any combination of letters, numbers, dashes, and underscores.

Reaching for file_get_contents() each time a blog post is viewed isn't ideal. Think about it: if ten thousand people view a blog post at the same time, that means you're calling file_get_contents() ten thousand times. That surely seems wasteful, particularly when blog posts rarely change. What if we instead cached the HTML for each post to improve performance? Learn how in this episode.

Let's now figure out to fetch and read all posts within the resources/posts directory. Once we have a suitable array, we can then loop over them and display each on the main blog overview page.

At the conclusion of the previous episode, we considered adding metadata to the top of each post file. As it turns out, this metadata format has a name: Yaml Front Matter. Let's see if we can find a Composer package to help us parse it. This will give us a nice opportunity to learn how easy and useful Composer is.

Blade is Laravel's templating engine for your views. You can think of it as a layer on top of PHP to make the syntax required for constructing these views as clean and terse as possible. Ultimately, these Blade templates will be compiled to vanilla PHP behind the scenes.

The next problem we need to solve relates to the fact that each of our views contains the full HTML structure - including any potential scripts and stylesheets. This means, should we need to add a new stylesheet, we must update every single view. This clearly won't do. Instead, we can reach for layout files to reduce duplication. In this episode, I'll demonstrate two different ways to create layouts.

Every application will require a certain amount of environment-specific configuration. Examples for this might be the name of the database you're connecting to, or which mail host and port your app uses, or even special keys and secret tokens that third party APIs provide you. You can store configuration like this within your .env file, which is located in your project root. In this episode, we'll discuss the essentials of environment files, and then move on to connecting to a MySQL database (using TablePlus).

Now that we've properly connected to MySQL, let's switch our attention over to those mysterious migration classes. Think of a migration as a blueprint for a database table.

Let's now move on to Eloquent, which is Laravel's Active Record implementation. Eloquent allows us to map a database table record to a corresponding Eloquent object. In this episode, you'll learn the initial API - which should seem quite familiar if you followed along with the previous chapter.