Well anything is better than the old and original Mysql extension for PHP. If you Google "PHP MySQL tutorial", there's lots of tutorials teaching still about my

Well anything is better than the old and original Mysql extension for PHP. If you Google "PHP MySQL tutorial", there's lots of tutorials teaching still about mysql_connect and mysql_query. AR is controversial but it is approachable. In addition, I figure, those old PHP tutorials (code like it's the 2003!) are giving bad example and beginners can't understand the difference or realize that mysql_query + bunch of procedural code per file * 10 can be bad thing. I should've been a bit more clearer. Laravel taught him bunch of generic best practices (like deployment procedures, GIT, OOP, MVC, etc) and using Laravel Query Builder and/or Eloquent makes the DB code more sane compared to mysql_query. Laravel isn't the only framework which could've done this but like AR, it's quite beginner friendly :)