This book is a good book to have handy, for people like me who sometimes struggle with makefiles.

It is short, easy to read, and packed with information that will save you time.

I was looking for a book that could help me in creating make scripts. A colleague had this book and he shared with me. I liked it a lot and so bought it for myself.

Unfortunately there is nothing quite like this book (at least that I have ever found) for Windows nmake. In a former life I was a Unix programmer and I found this book invaluable, especially for creating custom suffix rules and recursive makefiles. Now that I am a Windows developer, I still refer to this book on occasion.

There is a lot of information packed in this book. Read it carefully, as it is easy to miss important information. I have marked up my copy with a highlighter pen and have a number of Post-It's stuck on those important sections. Perhaps a better layout, with wider margins and bulleted notes in the margins would have made it more readable and easier to find things after it has sat on the bookshelf for a while.

For the most part this book also applies to the Microsoft nmake utility (comes with Visual C++). I have yet to find anything equivalent for nmake, and the MSDN information on nmake is severely lacking. Apparently the folks at Microsoft believe everyone uses the built-in development environment in VC++, but for managing and building complex projects it is absolutely necessary to write and maintain your own makefiles.

Maybe this is a good book, but you wouldn't be able to tell that by the index. Something as basic as using conditionals with make(if .. then) should be indexed for easy referance. I've had to root through the book for various situations like this because the index was so sparse. I have had much more luck using the GNUmake online manuals which are free.

I recently had to work on our project's make file. The first look at it made me nervous. Fortunately I found this book. This book is a great introduction to unix' power tool 'make'. The authors clearly had enough experience to tell us what,how and whys. The first chapter generates excitement to continue on to the next ones. Chapters two and three must be read with lots of patience. Remember, 'make' is a complex tool used for complex projects. Its not an easy go.Troubleshooting section listed some common problems, which, by the way, are really helpful. The project management is good too. The only complaint I have with this book is it is a little pricey.For thirty bucks, I expect more bang. The authors could have updated the book with new breed of make tools like Apache's 'ant'. An example of building a project could have really helped. The man pages listed for 'make' on my unix system didnt take me far enough to grasp this tool. I highly recommend it to beginners.