I did a weekend project with SDL to turn on a Aura HD with broken IR into a weather clock. Used SDL1.2 because 2.0 droped support for framebuffer output.
The code there is pretty bad but could work as an example. I did that before FBInk was released and certainly would choose FBInk instead for prototyping nowadays.
Anyways, here you are:
https://github.com/pazos/kobo-clock/tree/master/src. SDL will help if you plan to develop some kind of simple game/UI but won't let you build complex apps like Qt.