I don’t know what the best book would be, but I found this extract from Andy Farnell’s book “Designing Sound” to be a very helpful introduction to Pure Data:
Another useful book is “Loadbang - ProgrammingElectronic Music in Pd” by Johannes Kreidler. The 2nd edition is evidently out of print, but a free download is available here:
Of course Millers is the best book, I'm just joshing.
He created the language.
And I'd argue it's more than just a "language", it's a creative
paradigm.
What's more TTEM is still available for free download from World
Scientific Press, whereas MIT allowed me only to make a subset of mine
free.
Another thing of note; Miller has carefully conserved the development
of Vanilla Pd such that every example in his book (and mine) still
work exactly as they did more than 10 years ago. How many languages
can boast that stability?
Don't think I would call this about PureData, it just uses PureData for examples and the knowledge it provides is more general.