as far as build systems go, I've found cmake to be quite nice, I had to pull example files from another project I hack on (but not in the build system) and edit those to fit my new project.  But once I did that and customized, I understood the entire process and all but one file, and that was one of the find this particular dependency library and headers magic files (normally the dependency would supply this in some system wide way so that I wouldn't have to care about it, but this one didn't)