Autotools, 2nd Edition

PREFACE

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 cover—an old-fashioned photo of goats doing acrobatic stunts).¹

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 ...