could someone give me a brief overview of how autoconf and automake works.. and where do i get some doc on them

http://www.gnu.org has documentation online for them. Basically, they're a toolkit for configuring an application's build process so that it'll work properly across a wide range of UNIX systems.

have you tried google? you get a lot of results:

http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~rosalia/mydocs/autoconf_tutorial_toc.html
http://www.amath.washington.edu/~lf/tutorials/autoconf/

and of course
http://www.amath.washington.edu/~lf/tutorials/autoconf/toolsmanual.html