December 2005
Beginner
974 pages
31h 50m
English
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Makefiles
Sometime during your life with Linux you will probably have to deal with make, even if you don't plan to do any programming. It's possible you'll want to patch and rebuild the kernel, and that involves running make. If you're lucky, you won't have to muck with the makefiles —but we've tried to direct this book toward unlucky people as well. So in this section, we explain enough of the subtle syntax of make so that you're not intimidated by a makefile.
For some of our examples, we draw on the current makefile for the Linux kernel. It exploits a lot of extensions in the powerful GNU version of make, so we describe some of those as well as the standard make features. Those ready to become thoroughgoing initiates into make can read Managing Projects with GNU Make (O'Reilly). GNU extensions are also well documented by the GNU make manual.
Most users see make as a way to build object files and libraries from sources and to build executables from object files. More conceptually, make is a general-purpose program that builds targets from dependencies. The target can be a program executable, a PostScript document, or whatever. The prerequisites can be C code, a TEX text file, and so on.
Although you can write simple shell scripts to execute gcc commands that build an executable program, make is special in that it knows which targets need to be rebuilt and which don't. An object file needs to be recompiled only if its corresponding source has changed.
For example, say you have a program ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.