Being new to PD I find it hard using PD's help on Data Structures as it relates it to object drawing. All I want to do is create a list of data and read from that list and perhaps analyse the list... are there any basic tutorails on doing this?

i think you might want to look at stuff relating to tables / arrays, and their cousin objects [tabread] [tabwrite] etc... also maybe check out the [textfile] object