Rating: 

The good part is that it covers most of what makes up Make. As far as I know, there are no other books on Make. Thus, it is better than nothing.

The bad part is that there are no layouts for each and every command available to the user when writing Makefiles. For instance, I knew there had to be an IF statement in Make. However, the book does not have an entry in the index for IF statements. However, on page 95 there is an example of an IF statement. But it is wrong and it is presented incorrectly to show what kind of error you will get if you present an incorrectly formatted IF statement. Luckily, in the following paragraph the author(s) talk about why the preceding IF statement is wrong. This was the only information I could find on how to use the IF statement in the book.

Basically, this book is similar to how version #1 of the Lex & YACC book was. There is a lot of "Look! You can do this!" but no "Let's start from scratch, explain each and every command, and then go into usage of these commands." Look at the current version of the Lex & YACC book and the Perl book. Both do a very good job of explaining everything to someone. Don't assume we know ANYTHING about Make. Because that is when you begin leaving things out. Things which might be important to us - but not you.