Recursive Make Considered Harmful
- Miller 1997 - An argument against using recursive make techniques in the presence of cyclic dependencies among project subdirectories.
- http://members.canb.auug.org.au/~millerp/rmch/recu-make-cons-harm.html

Ask Mr. Make
- Articles on makefile optimization, build management and acceleration, etc.
- http://www.electric-cloud.com/resources/mrmake.php

An Automatic Make Facility
- Holyer and Pehlivan 2000 - Program uses no makefile. It records manually-issued compilation commands the first time round, then rebuilds programs using recorded command traces.
- http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/holyer00automatic.html

A Case For Make
- Fowler 1990 - Explains many old-make limitations and new-make (Nmake) features including procedure rules, accuracy mechanisms, viewpathing, and semaphores for blocking unwanted parallelism.
- http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/fowler90case.html

The Fourth Generation Make
- Fowler 1985 - A new make tool with support for CPP, dependency generation, compiled makefiles, parallel execution, pathname parsing operators, and a powerful metalanguage for builtin rules.
- http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/fowler85fourth.html

Make - A Program For Maintaining Computer Programs
- Feldman 1979 - The original make paper, including makefile syntax, implicit rules, double colon targets, macros, VPATH macro, and the usual cleanup and install targets.
- http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/feldman79make.html

Parallel and Distributed Compilations in Loosely-Coupled Systems - A Case Study
- Baalbergen 1986 - Distributing machine specific compilation phases among machines with a distributed make program is about 3.5 times faster.
- http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/baalbergen86parallel.html

PGMAKE: A Portable Distributed Make System
- Lih and Zadok 1994 - Reports design issues and results of modifying GNU Make to do distributed makes using the Oakridge PVM Parallel Virtual Machine.
- http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/470999.html

Make It - Generating and Maintaining Makefiles Automatically
- Schönherr and Wolff 1998 - A set of makefile dependency generator tools for working with files written in Knuth's Literate Programming style.
- http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/332458.html

Distcc, A Fast Free Distributed Compiler
- Pool 2003 - This paper describes a distributed compiler for C/C++ programs, and provides a good discussion of key issues related to parallel, distributed software builds.
- http://distcc.samba.org/doc/lca2004/distcc-lca-2004.html

Recursive vs Non-recursive Makefile Architecture Speed Comparison
- Kolpackov 2004 - This document compares recursive and non-recursive build systems (GNU make -j N) for building 277 software files in 15 directories using various combinations of parallelism and hardware. Non-recursive builds are faster.
- http://kolpackov.net/projects/build/benchmark.xhtml

Software Builds
- Codefast - Contains many articles on software build topics such as problem scope, stakeholder design viewpoints, directory structures, architecture models, makefile generator tools and software build methods.
- http://www.codefast.com/index.html

Makefile Setup for Java
- Geosoft - A GNU Make and shell script setup for Java. Features dependency scanning, class files, JAR archives, JNI interfaces, RMI stub and skeletons, and Javadoc.
- http://geosoft.no/javamake.html

Compare and Contrast Lucent Nmake and GNU Make
- Lucent FAQ - Summarizes the function and typical syntax of many make features, using a convenient table format.
- http://www.bell-labs.com/project/nmake/faq/gmake.html