This guide intends to coach you how to use SCons effectively and efficiently, by providing a range of examples and usage scenarios. As such it is not exactly a tutorial (as usually those build a single example topic from start to finish), but if you are just starting with SCons it is recommended you step through the first 10 chapters in sequence as this will give a solid grounding in the principles of working with SCons. If you follow that trail, you can feel free to initially skip sections on extending SCons, such as Writing your own Decider Function, and come back to those if the need arises.

The remaining chapters cover more advanced topics that not all build systems will need, and can be used in more of a single-topic way, to read if you find you need that particular information.

If you are viewing an html version of this Guide, there are many hyperlinks present that you can follow to get more details if you want them, as the User Guide intentionally does not attempt to provide every detail, to allow smoother study of the basics. It may also be useful to keep the SCons man page open in a separate browser tab or window to refer to as a complement to this Guide, which can avoid some jumping back and forth. The four important manpage sections describiing the of construction variables, builders, tools and environment methods are actually duplicated as appendices in the User Guide, to avoid inter-document links.