PHP & Laravel Developer Roadmap

What PHP is, why it still powers a huge share of the web, installing it, and your first script.

Variables, types, string interpolation, indexed and associative arrays, control flow, and the match expression.

Typed functions, classes, constructor property promotion, interfaces, and traits.

Namespaces, Composer/PSR-4 autoloading, enums, readonly properties, attributes, and the nullsafe operator.

try/catch/finally, catching multiple exception types, custom exception classes, and building an exception hierarchy.

Semantic versioning, the anatomy of composer.json, classmap/files autoloading, and publishing your own reusable package.

How HTTP requests and responses work, how TLS secures HTTPS, and what HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (QUIC) improve.

What SQL is, the relational model, and the users/orders/products schema used throughout this section.

MySQL data types, DECIMAL vs FLOAT for money, ENUM, TIMESTAMP vs DATETIME, and ALTER TABLE.

Creating indexes, reading EXPLAIN output, and why composite index column order matters.

What Git is, installing it, the three areas, and making your first commit.

What Laravel is, installing it with Composer, php artisan serve, and the directory structure.

Defining routes, route parameters, controllers, route model binding, and resource controllers.

Defining models, migrations, the Eloquent query builder, and hasMany/belongsTo relationships.

Blade templating, layouts and components, and writing and registering custom middleware.

API token auth with Sanctum, a complete protected-route example, and session auth for SPAs.

Dispatching a queued job, a complete Job class example, and why queues matter for slow work.

Writing a custom Artisan command and scheduling it to run automatically.

Pest/PHPUnit feature tests hitting a route, factories, and a complete worked example.

How SQL injection, command injection and SSRF attacks work, and how parameterised queries and allow-lists stop them.

Implementing cache-aside with real Redis commands, plus the cache stampede problem and mitigations.

A complete server block for serving static files, plus the core listen, server_name and location directives.

What containers are, how they differ from VMs, installing Docker, and your first container.

Real Laravel interview questions on Eloquent, middleware, the service container, Sanctum, and queues.