Laravel is best learned from the documentation. Laravel 5 changed a lot, but most things from Laravel 4 still apply; I'd recommend looking at Dayle Rees' Code Bright along with the official docs http://daylerees.com/codebright

You're right about the criticism though, it's hard to find any quality comparison on the internet, that's why I've posted here, in hopes of finding a lesser biased comparison, especially from those who've changed their go-to framework (e.g. from Laravel to Rails, from Express to Django etc.)