Wow! I can't believe you're not REQUIRED to learn it in the course of your study. When I was a computer science major at Virginia Tech, we were required to buy a Mac running UNIX (A/UX). I learned a lot running my own UNIX box - and that was in 1989, when it was far less common to have an average person running UNIX than it is today.

He was a CS major back in 2005 - hopefully he's graduated by now :D

Jay: So, did you eventually learn Unix? Any comments about the experience?

Wow, funny question that one Acme... I stopped being a CS major pretty soon after writing that post and decided I was better for the humanities, so I majored in Asian History and got a minor in CS instead. Then I graduated and started doing film production since, you know, that makes all sorts of sense... Sadly, that didn't work out and now I'm doing VBA/C# programming for a fortune 500 company in MO. I basically make very complex graphs all day drawing data from massive servers. And, oddly, I'm loving every second of it. Guess I should have stuck with CS after all...

[/brief history of last 7 years]

As for learning Unix, I did eventually learn quite a bit of it. Mostly it came out of necessity. I kept working with cheap-is-free tools for video editing, and it required me to learn how to use the command line because often that was all I had.

I imagine as I learn to program more and start doing side projects I'll run into the same problem with my iOS programs I want to make. But, I will say this, Unix is much less of a pain to learn when you see an immediate need for it.

^Fascinating story. So great to read the follow up to that 2005 post.

What is a "stub file" ?

It a small file the is created to get you started. It will be expanded as the project grows.

and what exactly will this command do?

I'm assuming it is creating some kind of new file?
Yes. It is named Makefile.am

the > says to create an output file from all the data generated from the prior command.

(echo SOURCES= ; find . -name "*.[ch]" -printf "%p ")

echo SOURCES= ;

prints out SOURCES=

; end of command.

find . -name "*.[ch]" -printf "%p "

.
starts in current directory.

-name "*.[ch]"

do a file name search on *.c and *.h
* is everything.

-printf "%p "

print out results.

( )

groups the output together so it all goes in the output file.

Well, yes - effectively.
But what ( ) actually does is start a sub-shell and run all of the parenthesized commands in that sub-shell.