I admit this is biased, heavily so in fact, but most of what I know about autotools comes from this:

http://voices.canonical.com/jussi.pakkanen/2011/09/13/autoto...

Which... the reason it sticks out with me is that really good rants are a lot more memorable to me than people talking about what software they like, which is probably not a fair way to evaluate software.

I liked https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/autocrap.html myself.