You really can't beat looking at existing model spline flow. But you should probably turn on the bias handles (if you haven't already) so you can see which way the splines are flowing easier. And pressing the PageUp key once will give you a better visual representation as to what's going on in shaded mode. Also, there's lots of great help in the past:
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...;hl=spline+flow
Here's a quick explanation of some of the things not to do with splines. I think there's more but I can't recall them right now. I remember a mistake I made was when joining patches, I didn't break the splines....I just joined the side of each of the patches and expected the splines to merge into each other.