Well-written explanations of what I almost knew about Make

I had already read Richard Stallman's own GNU Make: A Program for Directed Compilation, which biases my review. On the one hand, who could do better than the creator of make in explaining GNU Make? (In fact, Stallman did a good enough job that I gave his book a '5'!) So now, reading Mecklenburg's book, I'm probably forgiving of what may be unclear because I've already learned it. Thus I can only report my feeling as I read the first 50 pages of this Managing Projects with GNU Make. It was, over and over, a feeling of "now I understand!" As often happens, a power-user who is a good writer does one step better explaining a tool than the author, even if he is also a pretty good writer. And that's what I found here. Warning: this book is not a tutorial so it's not for beginners. It's not necessarily a reference book either. Rather, if you've been writing makefiles but some things you've done without being sure exactly how and why it works, use this book to complete your understanding.

Other Reviews

• Critical
• Well-written explanations of what I almost knew about Make
• Terrible
• An embedded developer point of view
• Most information is useful. Slightly disorganized, which causes a very slow read.