Fowler 1990 - Explains many old-make limitations and new-make (Nmake) features including procedure rules, accuracy mechanisms, viewpathing, and semaphores for blocking unwanted parallelism.

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.

Articles on makefile optimization, build management and acceleration, etc.

Lucent FAQ - Summarizes the function and typical syntax of many make features, using a convenient table format.

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.

Feldman 1979 - The original make paper, including makefile syntax, implicit rules, double colon targets, macros, VPATH macro, and the usual cleanup and install targets.

Schönherr and Wolff 1998 - A set of makefile dependency generator tools for working with files written in Knuth's Literate Programming style.

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.

Baalbergen 1986 - Distributing machine specific compilation phases among machines with a distributed make program is about 3.5 times faster.

Lih and Zadok 1994 - Reports design issues and results of modifying GNU Make to do distributed makes using the Oakridge PVM Parallel Virtual Machine.