There is a really great book for everyone who seriously wants to learn autotools: Autotools: a practitioner's guide to GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool / by

There is a really great book for everyone who seriously wants to learn autotools: Autotools: a practitioner's guide to GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool / by John Calcote (2nd edition from 2020) This is not specific to Autotools, but I like learning from well-structured books written by experts in its fields. The book provides a good path on how to handle this rather complex collection of tools without searching and jumping from one obscure internet resource to the other. And after a few hours of reading and experimentation, Autotools are not so unapproachable any more as the common preconception suggests. I agree with others that, once understood and the entry barrier removed, Autotools can be used quite pragmatically and are probably not harder to grasp as competitors in the field.