Chapter 10: The Code That Jack Built
Mull It Over
Why should people with nice integrated development environments worry about using a command-line make utility, when they can just hit a single button to build their project?
Besides learning what’s really going on behind the build button, knowing how to use make is a route to more powerful, flexible software construction. Rarely does a GUI build tool compare to the capabilities and malleability of makefiles. Simplification often is a good thing, and GUI tools can help developers to create software quickly, but this simplicity comes at an expense.
GUI build tools simply do not scale well and are of little use on really large projects. Make does have a cryptic syntax, but it lets you do far, far more. ...
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