PDO, Eloquent and migrations

Start with PDO, PHP's built-in database layer. You write a prepared statement with placeholders, run it with your values and fetch the rows. That shows you exactly what Eloquent does for you later.

Eloquent is Laravel's ORM. Each model maps to a table. Relationships are methods such as hasMany and belongsTo.

Queries read like Order::where('status', 'paid')->latest()->get(). Schema changes live in migration classes. You create them with php artisan make:migration and apply them with php artisan migrate, which records what has run. Guard against mass assignment (users setting fields they should not) with $fillable.