I learned how to use make by reading OpenBSD's man page for it[1]. It's written extremely well, and is concise yet comprehensive. Of course, it's specific to

I learned how to use make by reading OpenBSD's man page for it[1]. It's written extremely well, and is concise yet comprehensive. Of course, it's specific to BSD make, but most of the concepts are portable to GNU make with some caveats. FreeBSD and NetBSD, iirc, both have similarly high-quality manuals for their respective makes, and I've come to favor BSD make in general, using bmake[2] on Linux and Cygwin for my own projects (bmake being a portable, packaged-up version of NetBSD's make). [1]: http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man1/make.1 http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man1/make.1 [2]: http://www.crufty.net/help/sjg/bmake.htm http://www.crufty.net/help/sjg/bmake.htm