Laravel Learning Guide – Top 10 Laravel Concepts

When I started learning then I don’t want to go step by step and start with the basics. So I find out what are the most important things that an advanced developer should know about Laravel. 

If you know all the major concepts then they always stick in your mind and whenever you need them they always come up. But if we go with the basics and never come to a requirement that forces us to learn a new concept then we will not learn the main things. 

It is not possible to read all the documentation of any Framework or language. If we go straight to the documentation or a video tutorial that is teaching everything from scratch then that will also take a long time to learn everything. So in my opinion, the best practice is to find the main concepts of the framework or language that you are trying to learn and then dig deeper into those concepts. In this way, you will learn all the concepts because when you go and learn the main concepts then they will also cover how they will be used with other concepts and their sub-concepts.

So without wasting time let\’s start and review the list. So here is the list of the top 10 concepts you can start with.

1. Request Lifecycle and Directory structure and Artisan commands

When we start with any technology so our first step should be understanding the core things and knowing how that thing is actually working underneath. As in the official document of Laravel, they said if you know the core things and are aware of the working things behind the seen every thing will be less magical to you. 

2. Routing

Routing is the first thing that you need when you start working on any project. Routing helps you to set up URL paths and handler functions for those paths. In Larval these handler functions will be inside your controllers. And from these functions, you can render views for those specific paths and place the logical code related to that path inside your controller function before loading the view.

3. Request / Response / Request Validation 

These are the two things that you need after setting up routing. Because once you set up a route and its related controller function then you need a functionality that can help you to send the response to the client that sends the request. Sometimes your response is dependent on the data provided by the client, so you need to read the request data and send the response according to that request data. Request validation also plays an important role. Because you want to validate the request data before working on it to check if it is as expected.

4. Controllers

If you have worked or know the MVC design pattern then you may be aware of the term Controllers. It is C in the MVC. We use controllers to handle our requests so you can say that these are the end functions that we bind with our routes. They further connect with Models to fetch the data. Do some basic logic and return the response. 

5. Views / Blade Template

The second thing from MVC is Views. There are the files that are returned as responses. These files may or may not have some dynamic contents that will be updated in the view as per the request or user. So If you are working with Larval you should be aware of how you can return a view as a response with dynamic content. Sometimes if you are developing an API then you need to send the response as a JSON. There is one other thing in API response that is mentioned in point 7. 

6. Models / Eloquent ORM / Eloquent Relationships

Model is an important part of MVC designs pattern and Laravel. This is the layer in MVC that deals with the databases or any other resources for getting the data. In Laravel we use Eloquent for querying the database, and Laravel provides a lot of shorthand queries with the help of Eloquent in Model.

Eloquent is a ORM (Object Relational Mapper). It is a mechanism to create and run database queries using PHP functions. Instead of writing the raw database queries you can take benefit of the inbuild functions provided by Eloquent.

Eloquent Relationships are predefined join conditions that you can specify in your Eloquent models. Whenever you need data from a dependent table, instead of joining tables every time you just need to call chain an extra method in Eloquent query.

6.2. Migrations / Seeders / Factories

Laravel provides lots of features to work with databases using Eloquent. Instead of directly managing your database you can do everything from Laravel code. You can create, delete, and alter tables as well as insert dummy data in those tables for initial setup. To do all this you can take benefit of the Migrations, Seeders and Factories features of Laravel.

7. API Resources – Very important if building APIs

When it comes to building APIs using Laravel, it provides us with very helpful features for returning responses. Instead of returning the response manually after converting, we have this functionality to make it automated for us. You need to create a Resource and return it from your controller. Inside this resource, you can specify how you want to modify your Eloquent model response before returning it to the client. It is very simple and easy to use. You can read the full details of this feature from the below-mentioned link.

https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/eloquent-resources

8. Middleware

Middleware is a functionality or you can say a concept in which we implement some functionality before actually handling the request. So in simple terms, before the request reaches our controller function we execute some extra layer of code before that. As an example we can think of an authentication system, instead of checking if a user is authenticated or not in all of our controller functions we can create a middleware for that and it will check for the same before we handle that request in the controller.

9. Email / Service Containers / Service Providers / Facades

Now you have almost aware of all the concepts required to start and grow your knowledge. After this, we need to understand some concepts that we regularly need in the project like sending emails. As we all know Laravel provides most of the things that are required in web development out of the box. So we don\’t have to depend on third-party packages. So sending email is very easy with Laravel you take advantage of the built-in email feature.

Not that we have gone through all of the concepts. We need some logic to reuse our code in bigger projects. And some cool things that help us build bigger Laravel projects easily. You can check for Service Containers and Service providers, you will definitely need them in your medium and large projects for code reusability and dependency injection. These are very important concepts so you should check them out.

10. Gates / Policies / Contracts

Conclusion

So as this is a very big and vast framework and it provides a lot of functionalities out of the box. You don’t have to be dependent on other third-party packages/bundles all the time. You can take the advantage of the other third-party packages but you are not bound to use those for every small functionality.

Note: I would also suggest looking into and searching for the available packages/ bundles that are available and very useful in some cases. They help you save time from implementing things from scratch and provide you with many functionalities readymade.

Whether you want to use them or not but at least you should be aware of these bundles so that whenever necessary you can use them or in case you got some old project with the implementation by some other developer.

So hope this article helped you; If you have any suggestions so please comment or visit contact use page. Thank you for reading