Distributing Android Libraries via JCenter for Gradle Importing

With Gradle's build language, I can't easily remember when to put an equals sign in a line and when not to, e.g. from your example code, this has equals:

  bintrayRepo = 'maven'

whereas this line doesn't:

  classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:1.2.3'

I notice you've also got an example of a colon

  apply from: 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/attwellBrian/JCenter/master/installv1.gradle'

which further complicates things. Why not just "apply" ? Not sure if I want to remember all the special syntax cases in the build language.