let me let you in on a little secret, Laravel is build in PHP ;)

on a more serious note though, get yourself a decent book like

https://leanpub.com/codebright

yes it costs money but the Dayle put a lot of work in it so live with it

Surely you can't be serious?

http://wiki.laravel.io/Resources

While I shouldn't bite the troll bait - Laravel has SO many resources. Just look at our wiki to find some. There are like 10 books, a full website dedicated to screencasts about Laravel, Tuts+ has several free and paid courses, we have docs , Taylor has made videos, etc. I'll leave looking this stuff up an an exercise for you if you still care.

Ciao and best of luck in whatever you do next.

Not to mention the #laravel IRC channel on Freenode (web client on laravel.io), where you can often get answers to specific pain points you're running into. I've learned just as much there, as I have with some of these other books and resources. Sometimes you need to talk through things with someone.

Don't give up just yet; just adjust how you're approaching things.

I've spent the last 10 years writing custom PHP code and having taken some time out to learn some new tech, I couldn't be more pleased with writing with Laravel. Works so well for me, combined with Composer - I can't see myself writing PHP any other way.

Seriously 10 years of coding in PHP and in the last month I went back to school and found how I should be doing it now. Feels good.

I don't have a problem buying the book, I just want to make sure Laravel is what I want before I start investing into it, and so far it's sketchy. I say this, because I doubt the book is going to tbe any different than all my other C++, PHP and MySQL books I spent hundreds of dollars on and the most they taught was: $variable this is a variable.. Really? and what does it do? Well dang it doesn't say! $100 bucks and you can't tell me what a variable is? Really?

As for PHP I learned entirely by reading the manual on php.net, Then writing my own examples and then comparing them to the user contributed examples.

Also in my original statement, I stated that it was hell learning Laravel because of lack of resources. I've found plenty of videos on the internet, I'd even sign up for tuts and pay for it, but it's really hard for a hearing impaired person to follow audio and Laravel seriously lacks text based info. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to sound snobby or mean, just putting it out there that not everyone is the same.

Finally, if I did buy the book, what the book doesn't make clear, where would I find clarification?

Again, I'm not trying to sound mean or snobby, just stating that my experience with Laravel has not been very good at all, and I'm mostly upset with the fact I really would love to use it in future projects, but the lack of text based info is pushing me away.

We gave you multiple options for resources and several books are listed in the book section of our wiki. Your mind is made up and you're done trying - that much is clear. It's fine you don't want to try anymore, but don't blame the resources.

As I said before, best of luck on your next PHP framework.

You don't have to buy the book - you would make Dayle Rees very happy if you did buy it though ;). You can find it here: http://daylerees.com/codebright

And lack of resources? Seriously? The docs are pretty fine. Issues and problems? The old forum and the bug tracker in github has a lot to say about things.

Check out tutorials on Tuts+ about Laravel and things.

And like everyone had been saying to you, Laravel is PHP. It's still PHP. And surprise, it's built with PHP.

It would be very, no - extremely helpful - if you study inversion of control and dependecy injection principles.

Don't give up on it man. Have a cup of coffee, git clone https://github.com/laravel/laravel.git, and composer install.

I, to some degree, agree with you. By far the best I've come across are the Videos by JeffreyWay (laracasts.com). In the documentation when explaining features there is not even an API link to the class that handles this functionality. Can't be that hard to include that link or a few additional hints...

If you're hearing impaired that's a pity, the videos are nice and Laravel itself is great too.

But I know, written documentation for Laravel is not very good. Dayle explains a lot of functionality, but unless you are already used to the Laravel way of doing things (How would you as a beginner?) or expert programmer to whom application design comes naturally (I am not.), Dayle explains more the WHAT you can do with Laravel, rather than HOW you do stuff. Real applications hardly use any closures in the routes.php file, yet the book is full of such examples. Also it's not my kind of humor and in some parts its overly easy, while other (harder) things are expected.

I found the step by step written tutorials on Culttt pretty useful.

Not everything feels logical to me anymore, but it should be enough to get you started and it does show some pretty interesting ideas. Plus he posts the whole code of the tutorials (which is all written) to github and keeps it pretty much updated to the latest code (first tutorials are on Laravel 4.0, so bound to be some minor changes).

But there are plenty of free and written resources out there and most people on freenode#laravel are pretty helpful. ShawnMcCool was the one who helped me take my first Laravel steps way back when (somewhere in L3), but since then many others have jumped in to reply my (sometimes silly or even dumb) questions. Even Taylor isn't too good to jump in and help people out.

Laravel has a pretty easy learning curve, but can take a while to master it.

Give it an honest try before you dismiss it. It didn't disappoint me and I have made a few complex company internal automation apps/sites with it now.

I think Laravel makes a few assumptions about the person who starts using it (which isn't a bad thing):

• They are familiar with MVC.
• Comfortable using the command line.
• Have a decent understanding of PHP and web development in general.

I'm not suggesting that's the case here, but I've seen a number of forum posts/comments from people trying learn Laravel without this experience and it really seems to make it difficult for them to get up to speed.

For complete basics; I don't think a knowledge of MCV is needed. You can pretty much write all code on the routes file if you so desire. Something most 101 examples seem to do. But a basic knowledge oh PHP gets you a long way, but isn't that true for any language?

At the start, you command line knowledge doesn't need to extend much further than

composer create-project laravel/laravel ./ --prefer-dist
composer update
php artisan dump-autoload

That should get you through the first couple of days.

Take a look at the docs, installation section for information on how to install composer. And to get a webserver up and running, there should be tutorials all around the web getting that sorted on your OS.

On Windows I tend to use Vagrant, more info on that on PuPHPet and Protobox, with the second having the ability to install laravel from the setup.

I stick to the docs on the site. along with cluttt and fideveloper and stackoverflow when googling.

The site docs and many other tutorials come at laravel with an understanding that you either have L3 or CI experience and also you have a pretty good idea of design patterns. Along with the fact that the doc examples, that are getting better, seem to randomly jump between ideas. Take a look at the eloquent page ... why couldn't 1 example be used the fully instead of jumping from post, tags, comments to phones ... confusing and requires a bit to go back and see what you just read applies to the next section that uses a new example.

I also don't like how the routes file is consistently referred to. Yes, I get the idea that you can do it however you want but having a tip saying it "could" go here more often would be nice. I must admit that referring to the routes file has dropped dramatically.

Once again, I can really see coming from being self taught or from other old php5.2 frameworks to laravel can be a huge hurdle at first. I personally have spent most of my time learning about design patterns and how to do it the "laravel" way. But even though, I'm gripping about this, I can honestly without a doubt say that laravel has made me into a better programmer with a newer skill set.

Thanks everyone for the feedback and support. I went ahead and bought Code Bright last night, because I can't let myself give up. I really hope this book helps. I can also see that I'm not alone when it comes to text based info, and I did not mean to troll or start an argument. My intentions were simply to make a civilized statement that I was at my witts end after basically 2 weeks. I realized that after looking at all my posts from the old forum and the new forum, that I was going in circles. The reason I was going in circles and didn't realize it, is because I was desperatly trying to figure out how to get Laravel away from a 1 to 1 relationship, ie: 1 Controller to 1 Blade. So for 2 weeks I've struggled with building 2 controllers and displaying both of their outputs on 1 blade file. I Still haven't completely figured it out, but I know it's got to be possible, otherwise it wouldn't make any sense using Laravel at all, because I could write 10 classes with methods on a page and instantiate every one of them on the index page in 5 minutes tops with plain PHP. I was also frusturated that I had written 2 exact same queries, the first query displayed a row from the DB as expected using foreach, but the next exact same query only with a different name displayed the whole database as an array and Laravel threw the whole purpose of control structures out the window for some reason.

Code Bright is awesome. It really gets practical and serves as a great reference as well.

Laracasts are well worth their price. They give solutions to real problems in real code, and every few minutes you'll find another "wait, I can do that?" pop up.

I agree that jumping into Laravel can be daunting, especially for developers new to the whole organized MVC world. The main docs also assume a small amount of prior understanding of the concepts.

Personally, I came into Laravel a while back after very bad experiences with CodeIgniter and CakePHP; I felt they were too rigid, too "managed" for my projects. I liked to manipulate every little bit of my code, and losing any control felt terrifying (even pre-written error messages were a no-go for me).

Eventually I just learned to trust Laravel to take care of things, and allow myself to dig deeper into the code and customize things the way I want.

I have to agree. The resources are a bit lacking. I've read two Laravel books, watched plenty videos, and read the docs numerous times. There is a lot of how but not a lot of why.

I come from CI background and have played with Rails and Grails so I was able to stitch it together after a lot of searching and questions on Stack Overflow. But I can see how someone new to it all would have difficulties. All the resources assume you already understand a lit of concepts and just show you implementation details.

For instance, I've yet to find a good resource on Facades. Other than some examples on how to stitch them together with Service Providers, I havent found much on why its designed that way. Other examples and details on the concepts separately with the assumption that I've ever used them before.

Regardless, Laravel is a great framework and a huge step above code Igniter. Definitely worth the time to learn it.

You can also check out my blog post here: 10 Reasons Why Laravel is Better Than CodeIgniter

IoC, Facades, Service Providers, Repositories, general what-goes-in-this-file-ness was lost to me until I subscribed to Laracasts. The main documentation is rather geared towards "how to implement this for those who already know what it means", rather than a ground-up explanation.

This is especially true people jumping up from native PHP or smaller frameworks; back then, I was confused just figuring out how to include a file. There was so much magic going on that I wasn't sure where I could safely add files, if Laravel/Composer was auto-loading whole directories, if it was loading on demand, if I had to use PSR-0, etc.

If you're having trouble with these concepts then you're probably not a regular in the #laravel irc channel on freenode. I highly recommend you hang out in there when you can. You can ask questions, get answers, watch other people ask questions and get answers, etc.

If you can't be bothered to be involved in IRC, then I'm sure that you can use Google to find details on just about any aspect (StackOverflow included) because our community puts out a lot of content.

Individual questions can be asked on the forum, giving other people a chance to answer them and even more people a chance to search Google and find answers.