PHP 5 Power Programming is a classic must-read authoritative book with 720 pages of content published in 2004, cooperatively written by 3 PHP masters (PHP 5's chief designer - Andi Gutmans, PEAR's founder - Stig Saether Bakken and PHP's core contributor - Derick Rethans). Now its full copyright has been completely free.

About how hard it is on earth for learning MFC, this should vary from person to person. If you are experienced programmers started from the base Windows OS, you'd likely have been a member of programmers developing the MFC class libraries; on the contrary, if you just have learned few years of Windows programming, then you may have not any knowledge on the underlying system. In the latter case, you must have one book on your desk for reference anytime (every technology needs this). For MFC, it will be Programming Windows with MFC.

PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice, 4th Edition is suitable for intermediate/senior PHP programmers to read, also with certain help for getting started with PHP, but not much, because it puts more emphasis on helping PHPers to expand ways of thinking. For people with some work experience in PHP it has very high reference value, which can help to grasp the essence of PHP's object-oriented design and development, so as to ascend to be the high-end PHP programmer.

C++ is developed based on the C language, as a set of object oriented programming, general programming and traditional procedural programming, can be seen as a superset of the C language.

Head First Object-Oriented Analysis & Design (short for Head First OOA&D) will tell you how to analyze, design and write a truly object-oriented software, which is easy to reuse, simple to maintain and extensible anytime. That's one software will no longer break your heart and allows you to add new features without breaking the old mechanisms.