Terrible

I have almost no experience with writing makefiles. All I've done is edit existing makefiles until they work without really knowing what I am doing. I bought this book to fill in my knowledge. There seems to be a lot of information in this book. Unfortunately, there is a lot of information not in the book that makes it difficult to follow his examples. For example, on p. 5 there is text in there that makes up the file 'lexer.l', but the author doesn't say this. He simply puts that text on the page, calls it a 'scanner', then I see something called 'lexer.l' in the makefile he is using. It took me a while to figure out that the 10 or so lines of text he called a 'scanner' was in fact 'lexer.l'.

The author continually does this for at least the first 20 pages, where it took me hours to figure out what files he used and what were supposed to be in the files. This should have only taken me as long as it takes to type the files into the computer. There are supposed to be five files: counter.h lexer.h count_words.c counter.c and lexer.l. I don't understand why the auther cannot simply say "the text below define *.*", then write it out, instead of making the reader guess at what he is talking about. On page 20 he talks about refactoring the 'main' program, but what he really means is creating a new file called 'counter.c' not rewriting the 'main' program in 'count_words.c'.

It's too bad the author has decided to write in such an ambiguous style because his explainations of make features are very good, unfortunately, I can't verify this using his examples because he thinks his readers can read his mind.

The frustration caused by this lack of explicitness for his examples is the reason I give this book one star. Instead of simply using his examples, I have to figure out what the heck he is talking about, then try to use them the way he is. I'm spending orders of magnitudes more on this guessing than I am on learning make, which is why this book sucks. I'm only on page 20 and all ready I don't really want to use this book. I guess if you all ready know how to use make and just want a reference, this book is probably fine as you have plenty of your own examples to follow. But I do not.

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.