Fundamentally, the Make utility looks for files, and uses them to make other files. Although it has many uses beyond those we describe here, in this book we are interested in Make as a tool for development - to compile, install and test programs and libraries.
That is, Make is a supremely flexible tool that is useful to us at most stages of the development process in one way or another. It is also routinely deployed for non development oriented tasks: the UNIX NIS1 facility uses Make to keep its databases up to date, and push modified tables over the network.
Make follows the long established UNIX mantra: "Do one job, and do it well". The one job that Make does is to keep files up to date.