As I really need to get accustomed with GNU autotools, I was looking for some introduction docs. There is a free book from G. Vaughan et.al. (”The goat book“) but it’s a bit outdated and also quite comprehensive.

I just needed something to understand how it all works. Now what I stumbled uppon, is this fine online-book: “Autotools: a practitioner’s guide to Autoconf, Automake and Libtool” by John Calcote. It’s available at the usual bookstores as hardcover or e-book for some bucks.

And it’s also available in an unrevised, unfinished, work-in-progress HTML version here. That’s good enough for me, if there wasn’t that ugly HTML. Now theoretically, one could write a script that generates LaTeX code which would give a fine printable PDF. Such a script may even download everything it needs on the fly. And guess what, such a script already exists. You’re just not allowed to use it, ofcourse.