Description
make is one of UNIX's greatest contributions to software development, and this book is the clearest description of make ever written. It describes all the basic features and provides guidelines on meeting the needs of large, modern projects. Also contains a description of free products that contain major enhancements to make .
Full Description
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.
Colophon
Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animal featured on the cover of Managing Projects with make is a potto, a member of the loris family. A small primate native to the tropical forests of West Africa, the potto is 17 inches long and covered with dense, wooly, reddish-brown fur. Its opposable thumbs give it an excellent grasp, leaving it well adapted to its life in the trees. The potto spends its days sleeping in crevices or holes in trees, emerging at night to hunt for food--insects, snails, bats and fruit. Unlike many primates, the potto generally lives alone. UNIX and its attendant programs can be unruly beasts. Nutshell Handbooks(R) help you tame them.
...
Edie Freedman designed this cover and the entire UNIX bestiary that appears on other Nutshell Handbooks. The beasts themselves are adapted from 19th-century engravings from the Dover Pictorial Archive.
The text of this book is set in Times Roman; headings are Helvetica; examples are Courier. Text was prepared using SoftQuad's sqtroff text formatter. Figures are produced with a Macintosh. Printing is done on an Apple LaserWriter.
