On NetTuts.com today there's a new tutorial introducing you to the Laravel framework and how to use its session, authentication/authorization and caching systems.

One thing though that not a lot of programmers take advantage of is Laravel's component-based system. Since its conversion to composer-powered components, Laravel 4 has become a very modular system, similar to the verbosity of more mature frameworks like Symfony. [...] In this tutorial, we'll be diving into a group of these components, learning how they work, how they're used by the framework, and how we can extend their functionality.

First up is the session component that lets you store the data in various places (file, cookie, etc) and how service providers fit into this. Next up is the Auth component, showing how to use the service providers to hook into a custom auth handler for finding and validating user logins. Finally, there's the Cache component. He shows how to apply a service provider to configure it, passing the data off to a MongoDB database to be stored.