In my view cmake doesn't really have much of a syntax to be learned. Apart from the most basic variable- list- and function-handling.

Beyond that the difficulty lies in that calling any command lacks consistency and the output is just that some global variable without any convention were reassigned. There is no common semantics so you can not take the knowledge you learned from one operation and apply to the next one, everything is unique and non-composable. The solution to almost everything is just paste this random magic string anywhere in your cmakelist and it will work.