Slashdot

I am a developer with several years of experience in programming, mostly Java an Windows (Visual Studio, DevC++, PHP MySql, etc) environments. Although I know how to program in C, C++ I have never had interaction with any of the GNU tool chains for maintaining used code in many Open Source software (such as Makefiles, autotools, cmake). I know the basic usage of those (what are they for and how to create one) from some online tutorials I have looked.

Some days ago, I decided to engage in helping a specific (not very big) SourceForge C++ project to practice my C++ skills, however, after downloading the SVN code I was presented with an overwhelming source tree which used either autotools or cmake for the generation of the project. I tried to setup either Eclipse CDT and KDevelop to work in the project and also tried adding a simple class (.h and .cpp) manually but I could not make it compile successfully (did not know what files to modify for the autotools or cmake!).

Therefore I would like to know if there is any place or books (other than the typical Manuals which are not very didactic) which could guide me at the "logic" used when participating in projects using such toolsets.