In a new article from Tectonic today, Jason Norwood-Young takes a look at one of the harder things for beginning PHP developers to understand - objects.

Still the practice of using objects in PHP remains a bit of a lost art – you're more likely to find an application with a bunch of functions than objects. PHP just lends itself to function-like thinking.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't take advantage of the object-oriented (OO) features of PHP. The big question is when. Deciding when to implement a bit of code as an object or as a function is the real trick of object-oriented programming (OOP) in PHP (or as I like to call it, POOP). If you get that right, you can save yourself a lot of time and hassle down the line.

Jason starts off with the differences between OOP and regular, procedural programming, explaining it with a series of reasons/times to choose OOP. Of course, code examples are a must, and a few are included, showing the structure of classes and how to create new objects from them. He explains the PHP5 functionality offered as well, including private/public/protected values and functions.