Foreword The make utility is an enticing servant, always there and always accommodating. Like the indispensable sidekicks found in many novels and movies, make starts out as the underappreciated supplicant to whom you throw a few odd jobs, and then gradually takes over the entire enterprise. I had reached the terminal stage of putting make at the center of every project I touched when Steve Talbott, my supervisor and the author of the original O'Reilly classic Managing Projects with make, noticed my obsession and asked me to write the second edition. It proved to be a key growth experience for me (as well as a pretty wild ride) and my entry into the wonderful world of O'Reilly, but we didn't really think about how long the result would stay on the market. Thirteen years for one edition? Enthralled in the memories of those days long ago when I was a professional techni- cal writer, I'll indulge myself with a bulleted list to summarize the evolution of make since the second edition of Managing Projects with make hit the stands: · The GNU version of make , already the choice of most serious coders when the second edition of the book came out, overran the industry and turned into the de facto standard. · The rise of GNU/Linux made the GNU compiler tool chain even more com- mon, and that includes the GNU version of make . As just one example, the Linux kernel itself relies heavily on extensions provided by GNU make , as documented in Chapter 11 of this book. · The adoption of a variant of BSD (Darwin) as the core of Mac OS X continues the trend toward the dominance of the GNU tool chain and GNU make . · More and more tricks are being discovered for using make in a robust, error-free, portable, and flexible way. Standard solutions to common problems on large projects have grown up in the programming community. It's time to move many of these solutions from the realm of folklore to the realm of documented prac- tices, as this book does. xi This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition Copyright © 2011 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.