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 ```mermaid 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.