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.

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.

(I was inspired to submit this to HN based on the discussion around "An opinionated approach to GNU Make": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21812656 - a fantastic article, but one you get a lot more out of if you understand the basics first.)