Over on Reddit.com there's a great conversation happening after the poster asked if the learning curve is too steep for most of the PHP frameworks these days.

Does anyone else find the learning curve for most frameworks just too steep, so many times I've started a project and within a day or 2 I just think fuck it and start again with raw php, I just seem to be so much faster that way. But I know, well I think I know because everyone else says, frameworks speed up development, so how do I get over the initial learning curve, so I can get on with the project and not get stuck in laravel/symphony/yii/framework-of-the-month documentation?

There's a lot of comments on the post (100+ at the time of this posting) with a good range of opinions including things like:

• it's not that the framework learning curve is too high, it's that the learning curve of PHP is too shallow
• It might seem too steep to those not familiar with the concepts behind frameworks
• Learning some of the basic design patterns to figure out how a framework works
• Frameworks seem to be more useful when it's a larger project with a larger team

Want to contribute to the discussion? Head over here and add your opinions.

On Script-Tutorials.com there's a new tutorial posted showing you how you can get better curves on your graphs with PHP and GD (the key is in the "CubicSplines" class, providing a few extra calculations to make "splines", a mathematical method for smoothing out values).

Today I have new article for PHP. I will tell you about drawing graphs with GD. Plus – we will smooth our graph with curve lines using cubic splines interpolation method. You can read more about method at Wikipedia.

All of the code is included in the post, ready for cop and pasting - the HTML, CSS plus the PHP to generate the graph, plot the points and apply the cubic splines values. You can check out a live demo of it in action or just download the code and get started on your own.