Software Build Systems: Principles and Experience

Preface

Are you a software developer? Are you interested in how build systems work? You’re reading this book; so there’s a good chance you answered “Yes” to both questions. On the other hand, many software developers aren’t interested in how their program is compiled. Most people just want to press a button and have their source code turned into an executable program. If they need to fix a bug, they change the source code and press the same button again. Their joy is in seeing their program do all the exciting things it’s supposed to do. The build system is just something that needs to be there in the background.

Anything more than a small collection of source files requires some type of automated build system. This may be a shell script that ...