Procedural--enough?
<p><em>I posted a similar question on the PHP section of stackoverflow and was told that this might be a better forum in which to submit my question.</em></p>

<p>Without any programming experience whatsoever, I started studying PHP beginning in the second quarter of this year with the goal of slowly building my dream website starting later this summer.</p>

<p>Just as I was wrapping my head around PHP and beginning--I felt-- to truly understand the different concepts and how the code works (this is why I prefaced my post with my non-experience--I've really had to bang and cram it all in my head), I come across Object Oriented PHP.</p>

<p>I've taken the approach of of mastering (trying, as much as possible, at least) as many of the concepts and ideas before diving in to try and create my own scripts; much like learning how to dribble, throw a baseball or football well, before playing a single game. (of course I've played around with and done some code -drills).</p>

<p>My question to the experts is this: Should or must I learn and delve deep
into Object-Oriented-PHP, thus delaying my "start-to-code" date? Or will procedural PHP Programming suffice if one would like to build good E-commerce, forum/comment-type (like PHP Help) or basic social networking websites?</p>

<p>How far will procedural programming take me? A site with 1,000; tens-of-thousands; hundred thousand visitors?</p>

<p>Thanks in advance for your expert insights.</p>
