Once you have read and understood this chapter, you will have all the information you need to get the most from the following chapters, especially Automake which builds directly on the material discussed here. In the short space allocated to Make in this book, we have only really covered the basics of the functionality and application of the UNIX Make tool, and barely scratched the surface of the many extensions provided by GNU Make. If you wish to find out more about Make, or the shell language used in the command parts of dependency rules, here are some other books we recommend:
Before we revisit the application of Make, in the next few chapters we will discuss some of the other tools that underpin Automake, namely Autoconf and M4. But first we will return to the discourse on compiler tools from the end of the last chapter on GCC. If you are more interested in learning about the GNU configuration tools, you could skip straight to the chapter about M4, Voir Writing M4 Scripts.