Getting Started with Laravel (PHP Framework) - The Basics

Course Overview
Hi everyone. My name is Maximilian Schwarzmuller, and welcome to my course, Getting Started with Laravel -The Basics. I'm a freelance web developer, working with PHP Laravel since many years, and a professional online instructor already hosting an advanced Laravel course here on Pluralsight. PHP powers more than 80% of all web pages, but probably has the most patchy syntax of all available web development languages. In this course, we're going to have a detailed look at how to write better code with one of the most popular and powerful PHP frameworks you can find - Laravel. Some of the major topics that we will cover include what Laravel is and why we might want to use it, how a Laravel application is set up and works, how to render views and work with requests and responses in our application, and how to provide a great user experience with a little effort. By the end of this course, you'll know how to use your PHP knowledge to create in bulk Laravel applications that scale well. Before beginning the course, you should be familiar with PHP and object-orientated programming with PHP, as well as the basics about HTML and CSS. From here, you should feel comfortable diving into even more Laravel with courses on working with data and models in Laravel, authentication in Laravel applications, or advanced topics like creating an API with Laravel. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn the basics of Laravel with the Getting Started with Laravel - The Basics course, at Pluralsight.

Getting Started
Welcome on board to this Laravel basics course. I'm so happy to have you here. Laravel is an awesome PHP framework, and as a web developer, I've used it since many years and I really like how easy, and yet powerful it is. I'm happy to take you on this journey to teach you how to work with Laravel, to teach you the very basics, and to allow you to dive deeper into it. Throughout this course, you will learn all the basics about Laravel, including what Laravel actually is and why it is so powerful, and we will build this beautiful Laravel blog here. On this blog, we've got the possibility to read articles, to read a single article, or to go to the admin area and create a new article. There we also get the chance to edit existing articles at any point where we want to edit them, and view our changes back on the front page where we can, of course, also view our newly created articles. So this is what we are going to build throughout this course, and whilst building this blog, you will learn all about how Laravel works behind the scenes, how we can use different routes, how we can save data in sessions, how we can retrieve data, how we can communicate between different parts of our application, and much more. So without further ado, let's dive into it.

Views & Blade Templating Engine
Welcome to the second module in this course about the basics of Laravel. In this course, we're going to get our hands dirty and actually dive into the framework and start changing the first pieces. Now in this module, I'll start with the views and the Blade templating engine about which you'll learn what this actually is. Why do I want to start with the views? While when learning something more complex like the Laravel framework, which as you saw in the first module when we had a look at the project structure, has a lot of different files and folders, I always like to start with something where you can see what you changed right away. And that is the case for the response which you get back, so what gets rendered in your browser and therefore the view, which is the response you get back, so the page you're viewing. Therefore, this is what we'll have a look at. But let's start with the basic definition. What is a view? Well, I just said, it's the page you're viewing. So if you're on Pluralsight, that would kind of be the view. Now I don't know if Pluralsight uses Laravel, they probably don't, but the concept is the same. Of course, in the background actually you have some HTML code, which gets rendered to this page in your browser; so technically the thing on the right, the HTML code, is your view. But it comes down to this simple statement, a view is what the user sees.

Working with Routes
Welcome to the third module in this Laravel basics course. In the last module, we had a look at the response, or specifically at the views, which are rendered by Laravel, so what the user sees in the end. Now in this module, I want to dive into what actually happens on the server when we send a request, specifically, I want to have a look at the router, which is a key part of Laravel application, as you will learn, and as the router is the place which actually dispatches our request or makes sure that the request reaches the right endpoint. But actually, there's a bit more than just a router handling your request. I want to guide you through the project structure and explain when the request reaches which point in your application. So let's have a look at that.

Handling Requests & Responses
Welcome to module 4 in this Laravel basics course. In this module, we're going to have a look at how we can handle requests and responses in our Laravel application. In the last module, we had a look at the Laravel router. But before we actually reach that router, we'll send a request there, and then this request will hopefully give us back a response, which we will view as a user. And this is exactly what this module is all about, requests and responses. If you have a look at routes file, the web. php file in the routes folder, we already got a lot of routes set up here, and what we're doing with all these routes is actually already handling requests and sending responses. But we haven't really talked about that yet, so let's have a look at this in greater detail.