Hehe, same here.

It is a book called Snort 2.0, I think published my Syngress. It states in the "Installation" chapter to download the latest from Snort.org. Then save and extract it in the /tmp directory.

Goes right into ./configure and so on. Does not mention to change the install path or anything, but ultimatly it ends up staying in the /tmp directory.

It also could be im pretty new to linux and maybe they assumed that I would install it elseware, but the book is actually pretty thourough outside of that.