The PlatformStatus Page has some comments on how to install it. It has dependencies (leptonica) which also need to be installed.
Another solution also linked from the above discussion has similar details for other linux distributions.
When it comes to linking with your program, this post has some specifics
There is also a C wrapper to the underlying API calls; looking at the files included should tell you what to include. Other wrappers are available here.
The documentation of the base API class are here...
A comment from the Platform Status page for the installation.
Comment by tim.lawr...@gmail.com, Nov 23, 2011
I successfully installed tesseract-ocr on Ubuntu 11.10 64Bit using these commands:
sudo apt-get install libleptonica-dev autoconf automake libtool libpng12-dev libjpeg62- dev libtiff4-dev zlib1g-dev subversion g++
cd
svn checkout http://tesseract-ocr.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ tesseract-ocr
cd tesseract-ocr
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
cd /usr/local/share/tessdata/
sudo wget http://tesseract-ocr.googlecode.com/files/eng.traineddata.gz
sudo gunzip eng.traineddata.gz
cd ~/tesseract-ocr/
tesseract phototest.tif phototest
cat phototest.txt