Naturally, before we can begin learning about Laravel and the MVC pattern, we first need to install the framework. We'll tackle that in this lesson.

Now that we have a fresh installation of Laravel, let's have a look around our new project, and discuss the benefits of the MVC architecture.

We've already discussed the basics of views and controllers, but how do models fit into this whole thing?

Now that we have a modest understanding of the MVC pattern, let's next learn how to connect our Laravel app to a MySQL database.

Now that we've reviewed the DB class, let's next move on to Laravel's ORM, called Eloquent. I think you'll love it!

You'll love Laravel's templating engine, called Blade. In this lesson, we'll review the basics of Blade, while we build a simple layout for displaying users.

Master pages offer an elegant way to DRY up our views, so to speak. Clearly, copying and pasting HTML from view to view is a bad idea! Let's fix that in this lesson.

Routing to closures is helpful for quick projects, however, as soon as you build an app of any size or substance, you'll likely want to switch to controllers. Let's do that in this lesson.

Now that we've reviewed explicit routing, let's learn a bit more about the RESTful style of development, and how Laravel fits in.

Let's move on to Laravel's form handling capabilities.

It's now time to accept the form's POST data, and translate that into a new record in our database. Luckily Eloquent makes this a cinch!

Clearly, we must implement some form of validation for protection. Let's tackle that in this episode.

It's better if we instead inject our User object through the controller's constructor. Let's tackle that in this lesson, and learn about some alternative ways of validating a user.

Laravel makes use of what we call migrations to handle table creation and manipulation. You're going to love it! Think of it as version control for your database.

Now that we have users table, how might we go about adding an authentication layer to our application?