The Laravel manual was recently updated with a quickstart to help beginners to the framework learn the basic steps to creating a simple Laravel application. According to the Laravel News site they've also added an intermediate tutorial that gets a bit more in-depth with the framework and expands on the same "task list" example application.

This intermediate tutorial covers Eloquent relationships, Authentication, Dependency Injection, Route Model Binding, Authorization, and more. Both of these Laravel tutorials are fantastic resources for getting up and running with the framework.

You can find this tutorial in the Laravel manual and, if it seems like a bit much and you want a more basic level, you can check out the quickstart instead and get up and running quickly.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today Bruno Skvorc has posted some tips to helping you become a "PHP professional" and advance your skills and, potentially, your career in web application development.

When reading various PHP related blogs, Quora questions, Google+ communities, newsletters and magazines, I often notice extreme polarization of skill. Questions are either at the "How do I connect to a MySQL database?" level or something in the range of "How do I best scale my mailing system to send over one million emails per hour without introducing a new server?" I personally distinguish between 4 distinct levels of PHP prowess (likely applicable to any language/profession): beginner, intermediate, professional and elite.

He starts by looking at "the extremes" - the absolute beginners and the highly experienced professionals that have spent a lot of time "honing their skill". Somewhere in the middle are the intermediate developers. These are the ones he focuses on for the rest of the article, providing them with the knowledge and resource to advance. His recommendations include:

• Abandon spaghetti code
• Learn to set up your own PHP environment
• Exercise best practices early
• Read
• Find a buddy/mentor

There's a description for each one - and several more - with links to resources and other information to get more detail.

Following up on their tips for PHP beginners they posted a little while back, Mashable has a a new article with a few more advanced tips from the same group.

Well, if you happen to be one of those more seasoned PHP developers, this post is for you. Our expert panel has returned to offer helpful hints and suggestions for those of you who have long since passed the "beginner" milestone and are on your way to becoming true masters of the art and science of PHP. Feel free to ask questions and leave your own suggestions in the comments — the lovely people we interviewed in this post are quite likely to pop in and reply to you directly.

Tips included in this article are things like:

• Stay Current
• Interact With Others' Code
• Ask Questions
• Keep It Simple
• Maintain Your Code
• Work With Others

Notice a trend? Working with others outside of your own development bubble can really help not only your development skills but can also provide you with a good way to give back to the community.

This post on the PHPImpact blog talks about a compiler that helps to bridge some of the gap between PHP and .NET - Phlanger.

Phalanger is a new PHP implementation introducing the PHP language into the family of compiled .NET languages. [...] Phalanger compiles PHP scripts into MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language) which can be executed by .NET or Mono runtime.

He mentions some of the features of the tool (including interoperability between .NET and PHP and the ability to use current PHP libraries inside the .NET application). More information can be found on the Phlanger website.

The IBM developerWorks blog has a new tutorial posted today about using the combination of PHP and Ajax to create a simple chat application (with a database backend).

Learn to build a chat system into your Web application with Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) and PHP. Your customers can talk to you and to each other about the content of the site without having to download or install any special instant-messaging software.

Complete code is included (even the database table schemas) to create the simple application. They make the four pages to get it working and call that part of it good. The second part of the article, though, builds on this base and adds a fix for performance issues caused by constant polling of the database by the ajax request.

The IBM developerWorks blog has a new tutorial posted today about using the combination of PHP and Ajax to create a simple chat application (with a database backend).

Learn to build a chat system into your Web application with Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) and PHP. Your customers can talk to you and to each other about the content of the site without having to download or install any special instant-messaging software.

Complete code is included (even the database table schemas) to create the simple application. They make the four pages to get it working and call that part of it good. The second part of the article, though, builds on this base and adds a fix for performance issues caused by constant polling of the database by the ajax request.

Joshua Eichorn has this new post today sharing a project that he found - a PHP compiler for Mono.

I found an interesting project reading planet gnome today. It seems someone has written a PHP compiler for mono. Its hard to tell how far along the project is, since the focus seems on doing mono-ish things in PHP rather then running PHP apps on mono. But the project is open source (GPL) and it does let you use PHP within the wider mono world so thats pretty cool.

Of course that brings up the question, does anyone really want to use PHP inside a managed runtime like mono. I can see the advantage of using PHP to make a GUI app using mono’s gnome stuff since it would be less to learn (if thats actually true) but what would I gain running my web apps using mono, besides less compatability.

The compiler allows Mono to be able to run PHP code and is written in C# to translate PHP scripts into a "Common Intermediate Language" to make the execution possible.

Joshua Eichorn has this new post today sharing a project that he found - a PHP compiler for Mono.

I found an interesting project reading planet gnome today. It seems someone has written a PHP compiler for mono. Its hard to tell how far along the project is, since the focus seems on doing mono-ish things in PHP rather then running PHP apps on mono. But the project is open source (GPL) and it does let you use PHP within the wider mono world so thats pretty cool.

Of course that brings up the question, does anyone really want to use PHP inside a managed runtime like mono. I can see the advantage of using PHP to make a GUI app using mono’s gnome stuff since it would be less to learn (if thats actually true) but what would I gain running my web apps using mono, besides less compatability.

The compiler allows Mono to be able to run PHP code and is written in C# to translate PHP scripts into a "Common Intermediate Language" to make the execution possible.