People will tell you various things about OOP, from various perspectives. But if you want to form your own opinion, rather than take someone else's, then I suggest reading Bertrand Meyer's "Object-Oriented Software Construction".
Essentially, he takes non-OOP programming techniques, and analyses their basic flaws. He then derives an alternative technique which addresses those flaws. Put another way, he derives OOP from first principles. It's a marvellous piece of work, and very convinving.
Read it, you'll learn the why, when and what in a way that you can back up with reasoning.
