Why use npm with laravel?

Nowadays npm containing general tools for work with various front-end tasks. So, it's very useful to grab some packages from it. In case of laravel, there is two utilities, that it uses:

gulp - streaming building tool for concatenating, minifing your css,js code.

laravel-elixir - is wrapper for gulp, written by Jeffrey Way, who is doing laracasts for us. It's place where you can found out more about this this tool in particular and in common.