Learning to Program

Software That Helps You Create Software

In theory, build tools are not absolutely necessary. Each task that a build tool automates could be performed manually by a human. However, some software projects get so large and complex that it would probably take a week to manually perform all the steps necessary to build the executable software package. Oh, and good luck performing all those tasks in the right order. If you mess up once, you might have to start all over. In cases like these, we can throw theory out the window. For practical purposes, you cannot work on large software projects without build tools.

Even on small projects, automating tasks can save you a great deal of time and pain. In the last chapter, you learned how to concatenate files ...