Laravel Introduction (What It Solves and Why Teams Use It)

Laravel is a PHP framework that helps you build apps faster and more consistently.

Instead of building everything from scratch, Laravel gives:

• routing
• controllers
• templating (Blade)
• ORM (Eloquent)
• migrations
• validation
• auth helpers
• queues, mail, caching

Laravel vs plain PHP

flowchart LR
  A[Plain PHP] --> B[You build routing, auth, validation]
  C[Laravel] --> D[Framework provides structure + tools]

When Laravel is a great choice

• startups and SaaS apps
• admin panels
• APIs
• dashboards

When plain PHP is fine

• very small scripts
• simple websites

Next: Migrations, version control for your database.