Learning Gnu Autotools

I recently began learning more about how to use Gnu-Autotools. I found out that unfortunately, we filled up the CVS with stuff that should not be there, including makefiles. Now that I understand Autotools better, I see how we did not know what we were doing. It took me a while to figure out how to use autotools and what they were good for. I got so wrapped up in learning how to program in C, that I did not realize that the things I really wanted to change were in the shell script for compiling and running. The scripts have what the program is named and where it is installed. It took me a long time to understand what all the configure and makefiles are. Including but not limited to config.ac config.guess, Makefile, Makefile.am Makefile.in etc. I had a book on Gnu Make, but did not realize that what I really needed was the books on Autoconf and Automake. You can download them from www.gnu.org .