I'm a big fan of understanding the tools in our ecosystem, whether or not we use those tools directly. Make is one such tool that I initially used by copying other people's Makefiles, tweaking little bits and pieces to suit my needs. Only when I sat down and learned what Make offers out of the box did I grok those Makefiles I was using.<p>I know people might use tools like CMake, instead of writing Makefiles directly. However, it's still good to know this important part of the Unix ecosystem.<p>(I was inspired to submit this to HN based on the discussion around "An opinionated approach to GNU Make": <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21812656" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21812656</a> - a fantastic article, but one you get a lot more out of if you understand the basics first.)