In this new article from DevShed today, there's a look at working with the GD libraries in PHP by doing some fun manipulation exercises (I love manipulation, don't you?)

This article, the first of two parts, describes a fun little project that will help you sharpen your image manipulation skills. The completed application takes an image and converts it to a string of text that resembles the original image. Brian Vaughn gets you started.

Sometimes programming is work, but sometimes'¦ it's fun. Today we're going to work on a fun programming project involving image manipulation. This project will require that PHP be installed with the GD library (available at http://www.boutell.com/gd/, or bundled along with PHP 4.3 and later).

In this first part of the series, all they really do is help you get things set up - a working PHP intallation with GD integrated. They provide initial code for the manipulation class, but it doesn't do much of anything yet. I guess that'll have to wait for part two...