Laravel-4 Tutorial-1 : Things to know before Start developing on Windows

You Need To Install Composer And Git in order to work with  Laravel-4 and Packages Installation.

Three Folders must be added to your path    composer, php and  git.

Composer and Laravel

People on Laravel Project Didn't want to produce a strange php framework that don't know anything about the other Packages on the internet and that will enforce the developer to create his own version of every thing he needs to develop an application. instead the developer can benefit from other developers and can inject their standard packages into his project without the need to start from zero point again.
So,Composer  is just a utility that will help developers to install other packages into their project . That's it.

From Composer Site Documentation :

Composer is not a package manager. Yes, it deals with "packages" or libraries, but it manages them on a per-project basis, installing them in a directory (e.g. vendor) inside your project. By default it will never install anything globally. Thus, it is a dependency manager.

Also,  We need Composer to install the framework that we need like Laravel, Why we need composer .

You will get this error:

failed to open stream: Unable to find the socket transport

 "ssl" - did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP?

When try to install any package using composer and you didn't enable openssl extension

You will get this error :

'git' is not recognized as an internal or external command,  operable program or batch file.

When you try to run composer to install a packages that reside on git repository,That means the git program is not installed or is not added to your PATH.

Why do we need Git :

From Composer Site Documentation :
"To install packages from sources instead of simple zip archives, you will need git, svn or hg depending on how the package is version-controlled. "

-> For Tutorial-2