[devNoise]

Go with the "Laravel from Scratch" on v8 to learn the basics. Then follow up with the "What's new in Laravel 9". I'll be updating to v9 this spring. Laravel has been pretty stable since they changed to semver for versioning (ie v6). The framework is fairly stable. They held off the v9 release so it could have the new Symphony components. A lot of features that would have been released with v9 were added to the v8 framework. v9 may have some breaking changes, but I'd have to really dig through the release notes to find what would affect my app.

I'm more concerned with updating PHP from 7.4.x to 8.x then the framework update. Our test env had issue with one of our blade templates when running under 8.x.

[unfocussed_mike]

Yep -- I am more worried about the PHP side because there you run into the question of whether other PHP devs whose packages you use are as good as the Laravel guys.