Reading The Pragmatic Programmer helped me a lot with the problem-approaching aspect of things, but then I didn't pick it up until I was moderately comfortable with PHP. (I'm not a FT programmer so my learning process tends to be s-l-o-w w/o many opportunities for practice.)

I'd definitely be interested to see two different programmers write up their approach to a given problem. Something like this would be an excellent monthly blog post.