John Calcote - Autotools: A Practioners Guide to GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool

Copyright 2010

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I've often wondered during the last ten years how it could be that the only third-party book on the GNU Autotools that I've been able to discover is GNU AUTOCONF, AUTOMAKE, and LIBTOOL by Gary Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey, and Ian Lance Taylor, affectionately known by the community as The Goat Book (so dubbed for the front coveran old-fashioned photo of goats doing acrobatic stunts).[]

I've been told by publishers that there is simply no market for such a book. In fact, one editor told me that he himself had tried unsuccessfully to entice authors to write this book a few years ago. His authors wouldn't finish the project, and the publisher's market analysis indicated that there was very little interest in the book. Publishers believe that open source software developers tend to disdain written documentation. Perhaps they're right. Interestingly, books on IT utilities like Perl sell like Perl's going out of stylewhich is actually somewhat true these daysand yet people are still buying enough Perl books to keep their publishers happy. All of this explains why there are ten books on the shelf with animal pictures on the cover for Perl, but literally nothing for open source software developers.

I've worked in software development for 25 years, and I've used open source software for quite some time now. I've learned a lot about open source software maintenance and development, and most of what I've learned, unfortunately, has been by trial and error. Existing GNU documentation is more often reference material than solution-oriented instruction. Had there been other books on the topic, I would have snatched them all up immediately.

What we need is a cookbook-style approach with the recipes covering real problems found in real projects. First the basics are covered, sauces and reductions, followed by various cooking techniques. Finally, master recipes are presented for culinary wonders. As each recipe is mastered, the reader makes small intuitive leapsI call them minor epiphanies . Put enough of these under your belt and overall mastery of the Autotools is ultimately inevitable.

Let me give you an analogy. I'd been away from math classes for about three years when I took my first college calculus course. I struggled the entire semester with little progress. I understood the theory, but I had trouble with the homework. I just didn't have the background I needed. So the next semester, I took college algebra and trigonometry back to back as half-semester classes. At the end of that semester, I tried calculus again. This time I did very wellfinishing the class with a solid A grade. What was missing the first time? Just basic math skills. You'd think it wouldn't have made that much difference, but it really does.

The same concept applies to learning to properly use the Autotools. You need a solid understanding of the tools upon which the Autotools are built in order to become proficient with the Autotools themselves.