First, instead of calling this chapter "Dependency Management"
I think it should be called something like "Artifact/CLASSPATH Dependency Management".

There are a few very different kinds of "dependency management" going on in Gradle:

o Inter-project dependencies
o task dependsOn dependencies
o Artifact/CLASSPATH configuration dependencies (using Ivy and/or Maven)

When reading this manual the first time, it's easy to get these concepts a bit jumbled up.
Many readers might have heard about Ivy and/or Maven but never used either one.
Having specific terms for each sense of the word 'dependency' would go a long way
to making this material easier to approach for a newbie.

Another thing that was fairly confusing at first was that there is a 'compile' task and
a related 'compile' configuration. The fact that they have the same name is sensible
once you get the idea, but when you're first learning all this stuff having the distinction
pointed out a bit more forcefully would be a real benefit. Section 14.2.1 and 14.3 do that,
but it comes a bit too late, and it's kind of vague.

One thing 14.3 might say is:

Examples:
The 'compile' configuration is linked to the 'compile' task.
The 'testRuntime' configuration is linked to the 'test' task.

You might also want to show how this linking is accomplished by hand.
I think this is how you'd do that (but haven't actually tried it):

dependencies