I’m still finding the PHP Internals Books to be a welcome breath of fresh air. Today is was their instructions on getting a working build enviornment for the PHP-SRC repo up and running. Straight forward, no nonsense instructions. There’s a bit of assuming you know your way around compiling things but that’s always going to be a struggle for software written in traditional languages.
Why so many projects don’t include these sorts of documents as part of their source repo continues to be a 20+ year mystery for me.