It’s great that Libbrecht put a copy of his 500+ page ‘Snow Crystals’ book on arXiv [0] before an updated version was published by Princeton University Press [1].
The author also co-authored a book about historical and state-of-the-art pi computations called Pi Unleashed (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-56735-3). The code and additional resources are available at https://extras.springer.com/?query=978-3-642-56735-3. Though somewhat dated (circa 2000), there’s a lot of fascinating information in the 229 Mb zip download, including a 133 char C program (pitiny.c) that computes 15000 digits of pi.
Glad you mentioned Pi Unleashed. That tiny pitiny.c program is legendary in its own right. It really highlights the minimalism—squeezing out every bit of performance and precision.
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:
The developers have written a terrific open source book that walks the reader through creating a Spacewar! game in Cuis Smalltalk (just updated yesterday):
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.06389 [1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9780691223629/snow-c...