Before you start learning Laravel

Laravel, a PHP framework is nowadays widely being used to develop web applications. Those who are new to PHP may find very difficult to learn Laravel because of it’s poor documentation. I would recommend you to learn CodeIgniter before learning any other PHP frameworks. The MVC concepts and object oriented PHP can be easily understood if you follow the documentation of CodeIgniter. Various examples are also included in the documentation so CodeIgniter is very easy to learn. You will find no difficulty in configuration and installation of CodeIgniter.

The problem with starting to learn Laravel is:
1. It has very poor documentation.
2. Newbies can not understand the documentation properly.
3. There are very few video tutorials found on the internet.
4. The configuration of Laravel is very difficult.
5. The new versions released are entirely different to the older versions released.
6. You can’t find the video tutorials for latest versions.
7. If you follow the video tutorials of older versions of Laravel, you will learn nothing to work with newer versions.
8. The syntaxes used in the newer versions (5.2) are completely different than the older versions (4.2).
9. You may find a lot of video tutorials of older versions (4.2) but very few tutorials of the newer version (5.2).

Recommendations:
1. It is always better to learn the newer version so don’t think of installing Laravel 4.2 just because enough video tutorials are available.
2. Once you decide to learn Laravel 5.2 (or any newer versions) than try to find the tutorials for Laravel 5.1 which is much more similar to the Laravel 5.2.
3. If you will follow the tutorials of Laravel 5.1 you can easily configure and start working with Laravel 5.2.
4. Don’t ever try to see the tutorials of older versions (4.2 if you are learning 5.2) of Laravel, if you will do so, you will give up.

Laravel is a very popular framework to build up web applications. If you have decided to learn Laravel without learning any other frameworks of PHP, it’s alright, my suggestions may help you. Enjoy learning Laravel!