🐘 PHP & Laravel for Software Engineers: Complete Curriculum Index

Welcome to the PHP & Laravel Software Engineering curriculum. This track is structured from a backend software engineer's perspective, covering the Zend Engine memory lifecycle, Fibers & Laravel Octane concurrency, REST APIs, gRPC microservice integration, Eloquent ORM optimization (N+1 prevention), asynchronous queues with Redis/Horizon, Clean Architecture Actions, OpenTelemetry observability, Pest testing, and production Docker containerization with FrankenPHP.

Every guide in this series strictly follows a two-part learning format:

  • ⚡ Quick Dive: Syntax cheat sheets, concurrency matrices, and CLI one-liners.
  • 📖 Extended Guide: Deep Zend runtime mechanics, runnable Laravel implementations, resilience patterns, and container optimization.

📚 Curriculum Roadmap

# Guide Primary Topics Covered
01 PHP Fundamentals & Zend Engine PHP 8.2/8.3 features, strict types, readonly classes, Zend AST execution, and OPcache/JIT configuration.
02 PHP Concurrency & Laravel Octane Persistent memory models, Fibers, RoadRunner, FrankenPHP, Swoole, and state leak prevention.
03 Laravel REST APIs & Routing REST controllers, FormRequest validation, JsonResource transformations, Sanctum token authentication, and API error schemas.
04 PHP gRPC & Microservices Protocol Buffers (proto3), protoc-gen-php, gRPC client communication, and inter-service RPC.
05 Laravel Database & Eloquent ORM Eloquent vs. Query Builder, N+1 query elimination (with()), strict mode, and database transaction deadlocks.
06 Laravel Event-Driven & Queues Asynchronous queued jobs, Redis / SQS drivers, Laravel Horizon supervisor tuning, and exponential backoff retries.
07 Laravel Microservices & Clean Architecture Single-Action Controllers, DTOs, Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and HTTP client circuit breakers.
08 Laravel Observability & OpenTelemetry Structured JSON Monolog logging, Laravel Pulse performance insights, Prometheus exporters, and OpenTelemetry tracing.
09 Laravel Testing: Pest & Mocking Expressive testing with Pest PHP, database transaction rollbacks, HTTP assertion helpers, and Http::fake() mocking.
10 Laravel Production Docker & Octane Multi-stage Docker packaging, FrankenPHP runtime, OPcache preloading, and non-root security.
⌂ All Guides