Seems there's a lot of activity around docs and tutorials in this community at the moment. It's great for someone like me, giving Pd another try after a couple of years of using Max/MSP. Since I last looked at it, things are much improved. Pd-extended is great; all the libraries I'll probably/maybe need are packaged away in a .app where I can just forget about them. This is market leading as far as I'm concerned; much better than Max/MSP (or heaven forbid, SuperCollider!) - for me as a musician/geek (but not a programmer) the whole business of trying to figure out which stupid folder some bunch of stupid files has to be dropped into just - gets - really - boring.
On the docs and tutorials front, again I'm finding a lot of great stuff. However... just at the moment I'm trying to port one of my favourite max patches to Pd and finding it unexpectedly difficult to find the information I need. I find I'm missing three really useful things in Max/MSP; in order of importance, probably, consistent 'related object' buttons in the help patches, the Object Thesaurus, and a complete reference manual.
Ok, there are 'related object' buttons in many help files, but for some reason I can't quite put my finger on, I frequently find myself dead-ended in Pd, and not sure where to look for an object which might just do what I want.
This is where an Object Thesaurus would be really great, being able to look up objects (including those from extended libraries) by what-they-do category. For instance, the other day I was looking to see if there was something like the Max/MSP matrix~ and matrixctrl for audio routing. I couldn't really see where to start, other than trawling randomly through help files and tutorials in the hope of spotting something relevant. http://en.flossmanuals.net/PureData/ListofObjects is a good start in this direction (although that page is formatting oddly for me at the moment?)
Finally, of course, a complete reference page on every object...
nb 1 - of course, for matrix~ I ended up using, er, matrix~ from the cyclone library. Still wondering if there is another way, rather than just falling back on Max/MSP solutions...
nb 2 - hope this post comes across as useful feedback from a newish user, not carping...