Two years ago, i've started to work with Laravel. I've never had some previous experience with collections and neither eloquent, so, it's not a post about deep funcionalities, but some interesting parts that helps me to understant better how the engine works.

Collections

One of the aspects that most drew my attention in Laravel was the Collection object. One thing that bothers me about PHP array functions is the lack of patterns. In the example below you can see that both functions iterate the array, although the way that you implement the callback function and the params is different:

array_map($callback, $array);
array_filter($array, $callback);

As you are using an object when working with Collections, you don't need to worry about the callback position, since your base array is already defined in Object,

$array = new Collection([1,2,3,4);
$array->map($callback);
$array->filter($callback);

It looks better.

But the main reason why i'm in love with Collection, is that the Query Builder return a Collection. Let's checkout using the example below.
We're not digging in about database connection or something else, let's focus only on Collections feature.

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class User extends Model
{
    /**
     * The attributes that should be visible in results.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    protected $visible = [
        'name',
        'email',
    ];
}

$user = User::where('enabled', true)->get();

Now $user variable is ready to use collections methods, because the ->get() calling returns a collection.