Jurgen – whom I totally agree with – has written a very nice post about Procedural-Object programmers.
Most people tend to forget that Designing/Coding a piece of software is not about getting things to work, but more importantly, about getting things to work in an elegant way.
And the biggest problem is that it is really hard to define what “elegant” means. My personal opinion is that the Open Source world is full of very good practices that help drive the decisions. Sure, some software are crap, but looking at how Spring, Compass, Hibernate or other Java developers solve technical problems is in any case very informative.
Another problem is about designing the domain. For that part, I urge anybody to look at “Domain Driven Design Quickly” or Eric Evan’s Domain Driven Design book.