ROS Build vs. Catkin

This topic is discussed in catkin_or_rosbuild.

In my opinion, Catkin is more complicated for beginners and lazy programmers (like me) due to the cross-platform design. On the other hand, ROS build is easy to understand since everything about a package including built binary and library is placed in the same directory.

I prefer a simple programming platform since my purpose of using ROS is for research. So ROS build is suite for me. I recommend to start with ROS build, and then use Catkin if you plan to distribute your packages.