In most cases, the official documentation is just fine: http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/installation Laravel does assume that you have some knowledge of things like the command line, Apache, PHP etc - so the documentation sticks to the core instructions that should be the same for everyone, no matter what OS.

To get started, you can go down the Homestead method - but the following is how I prefer to get set up (on Windows). This is not really difficult at all, if a dummy like me can figure it out - anyone should be able to. The first part (setting up XAMPP and Composer) will take a bit of time, but we're talking maybe 30 minutes or so - not days of work.

• Install XAMPP (assuming you don't already have it installed)
• Ensure the required PHP extensions are enabled (check the Laravel system requirements)
• Install Composer. When the setup wizard prompts for the path to PHP, point it at your php.exe inside your XAMPP installation directory.
• Ensure the path to php.exe is in your system environment variables (Google for tutorials on how do this if unsure how).

That's essentially it, now you should be ready to create a Laravel project:

• Open a command prompt and navigate to a directory where you want to create your projects.
• Run the command composer create-project laravel/laravel MyProjectName --prefer-dist (replace with your project name)
• Wait for Composer to download all the dependencies.

Once it's done, you can navigate into the project directory (in the command prompt) and run php artisan serve - that should kick off the built-in PHP web server, and your project should be available at http://localhost:8000

You can of course, then look at using Apache to serve your project instead of the built in web server, for that I edit my system "hosts" file, to create URLs such as myprojectname.dev, and then set up VirtualHosts inside Apache.