How I learned Laravel

About me

I am George Jacob, I am a PHP developer. I use Laravel a PHP Framework to get my project done. I am a Nigerian based developer, from Port Harcourt, Rivers State.

Why I wanted to learn Laravel

I always had a thing for software development, and got introduced to PHP and C++ around 2005. It was like magic seeing how a line of code would make a page come alive. It became something i told myself I would go into. It actually took me about 10 years to get back into development, because as a third wolrd country I was limited by many factors. That never stopped my love for tech to die, instead it was a booster for me to actualize my dream. That was how my journey began.

How I approached learning Laravel

I started learning PHP by reading books. One of my favorite was "Beginning PHP 5.3 " by Matt Doyle and that guided me. i also read other PHP books like PHP cook book, PHP design Patterns and many others. This was not easy cos i had to struggle with having power and access to internet. I did many download of Pdfs. Growing with OOP in PHP i came across Laravel. Laravel made life easy for me cos I did not have to think of design patterns and most security issues because they had already taken care of most for me, plus they force you to make use of PHP best practices. I had access to pdfs and online tutorial and i have become more confident in project i am assigned to handle.

Challenges I faced

PHP and i blended well, maybe because i was introduced by an expert. But there are time you would hit errors that would take hours sometimes days to get fixed. It gave better understanding though.
Major challenge was also electricity and access to internet, they made my learning process tiresome especially when i have a bug on my code.

Key takeaways

All these made me to understand most of the errors one might come across, cos i came across so many. It was fun though because to me it was like a playing a video game where as you go up the stages became harder and you have to think of a way to get to the next stage.

Tips and advice

If you are a new developer, you have to give your all. i was told that as a young developer you need to live by one simple rule which is "ABC" meaning "Always Be Coding". Do not give up and I am sure you would be at the top.

Final thoughts and next steps

In as much as these processes described were awesome, i found that I learn faster with Visual, so my next steps in learning would be to download tutorials online and watch to learn faster.