Managing Projects with Make

By Stephen Potts

"make" is one of UNIX's greatest contributions to software development, and this book is the clearest description of "make" ever written. Even the smallest software project typically involves a number of files that depend upon each other in various ways. If you modify one or more source files, you must relink the program after recompiling some, but not necessarily all, of the sources."make" greatly simplifies this process. By recording the relationships between sets of files, make can automatically perform all the necessary updating.For large projects with teams of programmers and multiple releases, "make" becomes even more critical. But in order to avoid spending a major portion of your maintenance budget on maintaining the "Makefiles," you need a system for handling directories, dependencies, and macro definitions. This book describes all the basic features of "make" and provides guidelines on meeting the needs of large, modern projects.Some of the issues addressed in the second edition include: Projects covering several directories.Maintaining consistency when building variants of a program.Automatic generation of header file dependencies.Forced rebuilds of existing files.A description of free products that contain major enhancements to"make."Listings of the features that vary between different versions of "make" and simple ways to test them.More detail and examples on common errors, use of the shell in "make," formal rules of syntax in "make," and support for various utilities. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0937175900
• ISBN13: 9780937175903
• Release Date: September 1991
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.9" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

a handy guide

This book is a good book to have handy, for people like me who sometimes struggle with makefiles. It is short, easy to read, and packed with information that will save you time.

This is what I was looking for

I was looking for a book that could help me in creating make scripts. A colleague had this book and he shared with me. I liked it a lot and so bought it for myself.

You may even find this book helpful in Windows

Unfortunately there is nothing quite like this book (at least that I have ever found) for Windows nmake. In a former life I was a Unix programmer and I found this book invaluable, especially for creating custom suffix rules and recursive makefiles. Now that I am a Windows developer, I still refer to this book on occasion.There is a lot of information packed in this book. Read it carefully, as it is easy to miss important information...

The book explain make clearly

Followed comments from previous reviewers, I look make infomation at gnu site, but I cannot understand make. After I take a look at this book, in half day I understand almost all the make tricks. This book explain make clearly. Highly recommended.

we really need an updated edition that covers gnu make

This was a good reference book when it originally came out. But these days, who doesn't use GNU make? O'Reilly should come out with either an updated version that covers GNU make as well as vanilla make or they should release two separate books.