On Thu, 8 Nov 2007 15:12:19 -0600 Timothy Sikes trs164@hotmail.com wrote:
HiFirst of all, this is my first email to this email group, so, I want to make sure that asking 'newb' questions is okay, and that this would be the place to email those 'newb' questions.
Welcome Tim,
Certainly you can ask noob questions, it's what the list is for and things are pretty friendly here, you won't get any RTFM nonsense unless the question is a really obvious FAQ that you would find with a simple Google search.
I went through the documentation, and just got confused.
Out of interest, which documentation are you refering to? Some of it is for reference and is rather terse, like any programming language I suppose.
Next, I tried to find some basic tutorials on the web with no avail.
I have written some new tutorials which are very basic, hopefully I'll get time to web publish them ahead of the textbook from which they are taken. Meanwhile have another look because there are several others here on this list who have written excellent tuts. The Pd community is currently in a phase of intensive documentation and reordering existing stuff with a new multi-language wiki. Try using different search terms such as "Puredata tutorials" and "Pd tutorials". "Pure data" (two words) tends to lead to poor results. There's also a searchable forum with lots of beginner questions archived.
Finally, I looked at the examples that came with the installation. These were by far the best introduction to PD, and I understood them...
Yes they are well thought out and simple. Don't forget that you can access help on any object by right clicking it and choosing "help".
Until I got to the flow of control ones. It's the one where the counter counts up to ten, then stops, with another that is a counter that goes up by one, and you clear it by pressing the -1 button. Remember, I program, so if it could be explained as if I were programming, that would probably help me.
Dataflow is a programing language, but rarely do any tutorials take the longest view and step back to explain it in detail. It is a bit like the "canned loop" you get in GUI frameworks, an event driven system where the entire ensemble of objects is periodically evaluated.
I don't understand what the term 'bang' refers to in these examples,
A bang is a message. It is a most primitive message that just means "compute something". A bang causes the object that receives it to update its state, which usually means outputing its current value or moving to its next state.
along with why certain 'inlets' connect to certain 'outlets', or the flow of control in the programs
Stop thinking about flow of control so much and think about flow of data In visual dataflow programs each box is an object. From an OO point of view you can think of objects as things that only have methods which take data and only return values that are data. Data drives everything.
where the 'count' variable is and how to manipulate it.
The count "variable" is an internal part of the [float] object. You can't read it directly except by banging the float which accesses a method to retrieve the current value.
Don't be afraid to ask more questions. Like all languages doing it practically will cement the principles in place. The curve is quite steep, however you will find that after a few weeks it all suddenly falls into place rather quickly.