Quote Originally Posted by Mr Macro View Post
I agree, but there is know point jumping in at the deep end when your still wearing arm bands my friend.
I disagree, jump in at the deep end and either swim or drown... If you don't learn how to swim then you will drown, therefore if you are going to learn a language like Java or C++ then you should learn OOP concepts very early on, I found that many books believe you to be knowledgable on C before moving onto C++ but those that aren't seem to always introduce OOP first and never even mention a GUI.

Also two books which seem to be favourites among many good universites an on some recommended lists for 1st, 2nd, 3rd and even 4th years are "Head First Java" and "Head First Design Patterns" because they introduce objects, OOD (Object Oriented Design) and OOP (Object Oriented Programming) very early on. The evidence being in Head First Java the second chapter being: "2 A Trip to Objectville: yes, there will be objects " which I believe is a very good read (more into C++ at the moment myself)

I believe and this is my opinion, which I know others will believe to that OOP is a certain frameset, for example if you went from doing Java to Haskell (an old enemy to many) you would need to change your mind-frame entirely, I know many programmers have issues with doing this because of the sheer annoyance at Haskell which is a pure-functional non-strict programming language, generally logical and very mathematical (I hear, don't quote me on that)

So if you want to learn OOP then do so, with PHP I would learn the concepts of OOP using say Java and then use them with PHP as I find Java docs will be better than most books on PHP OOP.