As a software developer until now, I've mostly worked on projects that were quite "monolithic" with hardly any dependencies on other projects, without building automation (no Make, Ant, Maven, etc.) and kept on a simple version control system (mostly Subversion) with just a few easily managed version branches.

Now together with some friends I'm planning a project that is intended to run on multiple platforms (mostly mobile: Android, iOS, Kindle, Windows, etc.), thus written in several languages and on different development platforms.

This will lead to many dependencies: All projects sharing the same resources (e.g. images) or projects dependent on each other (e.g. a core Java library project used by the Android and other Java based implementations).

So what I need is some basic information on how to answer questions such as: How would the VCS be structured? Would a client-base or a decentralized VCS be better? How to decide building automation system(s) to use?

Since this quite an open question I guess for now it would be great if you could point me to any books or web resources that you can recommend for this topic.