&gt; I actually met a young aspiring web developer who still learned DB-access with mysql_* functions. I urged him to switch to a sane framework like Laravel. Oh boy he was happy in a month and learned bunch of best practices quickly.<p>There is some middle ground good practice which is using PDO, or even better Doctrine&#x2F;DBAL . I don&#x27;t think Laravel&#x27;s ORM is that good, and the Active Record Pattern is somehow controversial.