Review By: Scott McMaster
10/19/2011Software Build Systems by Peter Smith seeks to provide guidance for choosing, setting up, and managing software builds. Smith is primarily concerned with C/C++, Java, and C# builds. There is little discussion of build-system issues specifically relating to web applications.

The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 discusses basic concepts of a build system and gives a simple example using GNU Make. Part 2 is a survey of a number of popular build tools, including GNU Make, Ant, SCons, CMake, and Eclipse. Parts 3 and 4 (about one third of the book) expand into a wide variety of topics including dependencies, version management, and controlling complexity and optimizing large builds.

Readers may find parts 1 and 2 to be only of marginal use. The intent of the build-tool survey seems to be to illustrate different approaches and certain principles of building. Unfortunately, the principles get lost in the details of the individual tools. There are several sections that seem out of place in a book on build systems and unfortunately distract from the main presentation, including introductory Python material (relating to SCons) and some extremely basic Eclipse facts (including ample screenshots that are likely to become out of date). These combine to make parts 1 and 2 overly long at about 300 pages. And yet, none of the surveyed tools is discussed in enough depth to be of much help in starting or maintaining a non-trivial build process. Doing that would require obtaining additional resources on your tool of choice.

Parts 3 and 4 are much closer to what the "Principles and Experience" subtitle might suggest, including chapters on dependencies, managing build size, and speeding up builds. A large body of wisdom is distilled into a single chapter on reducing complexity, with immediately usable tips and best practices like not allowing the build system to invoke the version control system and not controlling the build with environment variables. The material on building and integrating with components is particularly interesting.

An experienced build engineer probably would not find this book useful, as most of the material is quite basic. Software Build Systems is best suited for developers and testers who are unfamiliar with build systems but wish to apply additional rigor to their existing processes.