O'Reilly has revised and updated its book on the make utility. The third edition of “Managing Projects with GNU Make” focuses on GNU make, covering the basics and the new capabilities of one of the most important and enduring programming tools.

(Click for larger view of the potto and its four prehensile thumbs)

Make was invented in 1970, and is still used in most programming projects, including the Linux kernel, according to author Robert Mecklenburg. Make was originally designed to save programmers time, by checking timestamps to see which files in a source tree had changed, before rebuilding only what was needed. Since then, it has evolved many options for manipulating multiple directories, building different versions of programs for different platforms, and customizing builds in other ways. It has become a versatile pre-processing language that Mecklenburg even used to build his book (which includes discussion of its own makefile).

Mecklenburg has also developed a make object system, discussed in an appendix, which attests to the power and versatility of make.

According to O'Reilly, the book shows developers how to exploit make's potential for building software efficiently, reducing maintenance, avoiding errors, and thoroughly understanding what make is doing. The new edition focuses on the GNU version of make, which Mecklenburg says has become the industry standard. “Developers have been abandoning [traditional make] for newer tools such as cmake, scion, and Ant. GNU make is a fully backward-compatible make that doesn't suffer from the lack of features many developers attribute to traditional make.”

Chapters on C++ and Java provide makefile entries optimized for projects in those areas, and the book covers GNU make's new eval function. “This new feature, along with its many other unique features, demands a reassessment of make's role in the software development process. Unless the full capabilities of the tool are understood by developers, they can't make informed choices about how their projects should be realized,” says Mecklenburg.

Dan Hanks, of the Provo LUG (Linux user group), said of a previous edition, “The book deserves to be rated right up there with the camel and the bat as a classic in the O'Reilly bestiary.”

Rob Henley, of Siemens-Nixdorf, said, “I use make very frequently in my day-to-day work and thought I knew everything that I needed to know about it. After reading this book, I realized that I was wrong!”

A Root Journal review from 1990 said, “If you can't pick up your system's yp makefile, read every line, and make sense of it, you need this book.”

Availability

“Managing Projects with GNU Make” is available now, direct from O'Reilly and other bookstores, priced at $29.95. A sample chapter on debugging makefiles is also available.

 
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