I won't tell you to abandon php (I haven't entirely either for pragmatic reasons) but I would suggest "going to the source" and learning about smalltalk. Other

I won't tell you to abandon php (I haven't entirely either for pragmatic reasons) but I would suggest "going to the source" and learning about smalltalk. Other than the meta object stuff it will, in the main, transfer over to how you write php and think about OO. More pragmatically I'd also recommend learning from and leveraging the SPL stuff (http://www.php.net/~helly/php/ext/spl/ http://www.php.net/~helly/php/ext/spl/)