Managing Projects with make (Paperback)

by Andrew Oram (Author), Steve Talbott (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
make is one of UNIX's greatest contributions to software development, and this book offers 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. This book describes all the basic features of make and provides guidelines on meeting the needs of large, modern projects.

From the Publisher
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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 2 edition (February 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0937175900
• ISBN-13: 978-0937175903
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #747,326 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars we really need an updated edition that covers gnu make, October 26, 1999

By	Lloyd Doppler "technologist. attorney. writer... (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews

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.

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars You're better off reading the GNU make documentation, December 27, 1997

By	Robert Vadnais (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm an ardent consumer of O'Reilly books, but I was quite disappointed with the quality of their make book. I read it about 5 years ago with a rudimentary understanding of make, yet it did little to further explain things I already knew.

I recently read the GNU make documentation and clarified many fuzzy make concepts. I recommend it over the ORA make book. Besides, GNU make is cooler than vanilla make. 8-)

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Useful yet disapointing, December 4, 1997

By	Rabble (Montevideo, Uruguay) - See all my reviews

I found managing projects with make to be below the usual very high quality of O'Reilly books. That is to say if it was by some other publisher I would be pleased with it, but O'Reilly has so consistently produced very high quality technical books that I was disappointed by the lack of depth.

I still feel reasonably safe in recommending it as a good book to learn how to use make, but that's all it is. It would be nice to include more information about how use it for applications beyond simply compiling c, assembly, and lib's into applications.