Jeff Madsen has a quick post to his site with the "untold story" behind Eloquent's save and create in the Laravel framework.

Over on Laravel Quick Tips we've been looking at a few of these functions and their uses, and I thought it might be helpful to collect all of them together in a single (I hope) coherent post.

Without further preamble, let's get to it. I'm going to use the basic User object and table that ships with a default installation of Laravel so you can follow along if you like.

He starts with the difference between "new" and "create", pointing out the one fundamental difference: one saves, one does not. He then looks at some of the other new/create functions (like findOrNew, firstOrCreate, updateOrCreate), what each of them does in the background and a quick snippet of code showing.