It's a mature, well designed and cleanly written piece of software that is very modular. It also has a great documentation and knowledgeable community around it.

Other PHP frameworks lack some or most of these features: some are either very opinionated and rigid (Yii, Cake) huge and sparsely documented (Zend 2) or just old and approaching abandonment (Codeigniter, Kohana).

I'm just starting to learn PHP, and I noticed that recently there have a few new books about Laravel. So, it seems to be the "new hot thing" in PHP.

To a newbie, would you recommend Symfony, or Laravel?

Thanks!

Symfony can be overwhelming for a newbie, but that's because web development is becoming a bigger field every day. There is so much to learn, and Symfony will teach you all kinds of best practices and other things that are not framework-specific at all. To learn Symfony is to learn web development done right.

Laravel is basically a wrapper around Symfony, to make it simpler and easier. A newbie might prefer to use that, but at some point after feeling comfortable with the basics like MVC, ORM, etc. you will definitely want to move to the more professional Symfony.

Yup, Laravel is a great starter framework. Like jafaku said, it uses a lot of Symfony components under the hood so it will be familiar territory if you decide to try out Symfony one day.

Be sure to check out Jeffrey Way's Laracasts, it's a really good site offering tutorials mostly for newbies.

I really like Yii. In my opinion it is exceptionally well designed and offers so much functionality.

The Yii programmers designed it with performance in mind. I can understand that you find it opinionated, but in my opinions the pros outweigh the cons.

I liked Yii too, until I had to switch to Laravel for a new client. While Laravel is missing a few features baked in, like generators and admin tools, 95% of Laravel is way better designed and documented than Yii.

The only worthwhile point I still see in favor of Yii is its ORM can generate fewer, albeit more complicated, queries when eagerly loading nested objects. (OTOH, I encountered some ugly pagination bugs last summer when doing that...)

>It's a mature, well designed and cleanly written piece of software //

Just went to the Symfony site for my first time, to have a look. OK, I'll install it ... requires use of Alpha software (Composer) to install? Also, they tell you to pipe that script straight through PHP - don't appear to be any sha hash sums given or anything. Doesn't seem terribly mature and well-designed so far.