I like to try out new software now and again and sometimes it's not available in binary form for my operating system(s). I use Ubuntu and Debian most of the time.

I would like to learn how to compile software in a clean way and be able to manage it without ending up with a computer full of files all over my system that have no business there. Basically Install/Remove without package management that wont mess up my system.

So I'm looking for online books, guides, tutorials to go through, just learn it all the way.
And maybe offline books later, so I welcome them also. Debian/Ubuntu specific material and possibly some integration with APT (making APT aware) if available would be really cool.

Right now I know how to download, unzip, install dependencies and do ./configure, make, make install. Nothing else really. Hope I'm being clear enough.

Now can someone help by pointing out the material to study?

There's nothing cleaner than the old get sources, untar, ./configure, make and make install. As long as you remember not to erase these folders and also don't forget that you can always do a make uninstall.

I think programming and using make (and autoconf et al.) yourself would be beneficial, but I suppose it's a lot of effort if you're only going to use this for `black-box-compiling' the programs you want to use.

Just a thought --Jonas

I generally put programs I install (via source) in /usr/src/zips or something similar. If I ever need to uninstall that program, I unzip the correct file and do a make uninstall. Works like a charm.

Package management is nice, but I have 0 difficulty installing from source (Slackware has taught me a number of good things)

You could try building your own .debs, using dpkg. See the dpkg man page, this is a bit of work to learn how to do, but it is an ideal solution for what you want.

There are plenty of pages that google knows about explaining how to do this.

checkinstall helps here as well.