PHP is still an exciting, evolving space and there's still a lot of excitement around it, while being familiar and productive. I try other things and have some misgivings with Laravel and PHP, but I always come back to them and trust them to get the job done.
I'm a bit biased, as I've built my career on top of PHP, but it seems to me that the language is going up. Not in terms of popularity maybe, but definitely in cutting-edge technology. Laravel is a rapidly-evolving framework that is even pioneering serverless deployments for PHP. PHP8 will have a JIT compiler which will improve performance. There is a websocket server that can handle 15K concurrent connections on a single, cheap DigitalOcean droplet.
PHP is still an exciting, evolving space and there's still a lot of excitement around it, while being familiar and productive. I try other things and have some misgivings with Laravel and PHP, but I always come back to them and trust them to get the job done.
Are there any resources (websites, video tutorials, books, etc) you would recommend for learning Laravel?
Nothing beats laracasts.com. Some of the lessons are free but it's totally worth it if you decide to buy a subscription.
totally agree!
laracasts is awesome resource for learning laravel, as well as php basics, vue and other stuff