The documentation for Laravel is readable, in the sense that if you read it from beginning to end, like a book or tutorial, you will get a pretty good understanding of what Laravel does. But [supreme being of your choice] help you if you just want to find out what the possible values for a specific parameter of a specific method can be...
Nah. It's pretty bad. They only document like 5% of the features. What they do document is good but other than that you have to read the source on GitHub or Google for code snippets and I say this as an expert that studied the docs for help in documenting my own orm. They just straight up don't document most of Eloquent's features and class methods in the docs at all and it's super frustrating to me.
But why? I‘m working with it daily and what I learned is to read the docs properly. Usually it‘s me not reading correctly. There is some advanced stuff that‘s not covered in the docs, but not necessary to build an app.
That's exactly the point: a documentation should be comprehensive, i.e. it for each class and each method it should describe exactly what the method does, including all parameters etc. The Laravel "documentation" is a tutorial, i.e. it describes what you should do for the most common use cases in a style designed to be read from beginning to end. Which has its uses too, but as documentation, it's pretty lacking...
Laravel tutorials are a fruitful business because PHP still quite rightfully carries its legacy of being the noob language.
I’m sure that plenty of us used PHP in the day, have been doing something else for a while, and see these HN posts from the people that stuck by PHP singing its praises. Let’s not forget that there’s probably been a steady stream of newbies coming through the system the entire time - which makes the language, and by extension Laravel, a prime target for bottom feeding ‘one step ahead of the audience’ “educational” content producing scum.
Guess that is why selling Laravel tutorials seems to be a fruitful business.