If you have a job asking you to write or maintain PHP software, then you should indeed learn it enough to do a good job. But otherwise, IMO, your time would be

If you have a job asking you to write or maintain PHP software, then you should indeed learn it enough to do a good job. But otherwise, IMO, your time would be better used learning something else, or another programming language. For example, learning Common Lisp (or scheme), or Haskell, or Prolog, etc, would let you learn new concepts and make you a better PHP programmer in the end, because learning those languages would make you a better programmer in general. http://www.dmi.unict.it/~barba/PROG-LANG/PROGRAMMI-TESTI/READING-MATERIAL/paradigmsDIAGRAM.jpg http://www.dmi.unict.it/~barba/PROG-LANG/PROGRAMMI-TESTI/REA... PHP is in the second little pink box on the right "Sequential object-oriented programming". There are a lot of other boxes to learn!