A linker is a stupid, pedestrian, straightforward program. All it does is concatenate together the code and data sections of the object files, connect the references to symbols with their definitions, pull unresolved symbols out of the library, and write out an executable.
Although it is not always immediately obvious why you get a particular linker message, there is nothing magical about linkers. The mechanics are straightforward; it's the details you have to figure out in each case.
