Autotools: practitioner's guide
Useful examples — and prefixes.
Autotools Mythbuster
With years of Gentoo experience: How not to enrage your distributions.
Autoconf Manual
The official manual. Detailed, huge and hard to digest.
Automake Manual
As above. Keep it handy as reference.
I recently started looking into Autotools, to make it easier to run my code on multiple platforms.
Naturally you can use cmake or scons or waf or ninja or tup, all of which are interesting in there own respect. But none of them has seen the amount of testing which went into autotools, and none of them have the amount of tweaks needed to support about every system under the sun. And I recently found pyconfigure which allows using autotools with python and offers detection of library features.
Warning 2016: Contains some cargo-cult-programming — my current setup is cleaner thanks to using AC_CONFIG_LINKS
in configure.ac
.