Some thoughts about intermediate/make/00-intro.md..
should we bother explaining terminology like graph and dependencies so early? Recommend deleting this paragraph, as it is explained in detail later on.
why are we mentioning SCons, Apache Ant, etc..?
the "ugly details" comment relating to IDEs makes coupled with "[Make is] very cryptic little language, without a debugger, whose conventions and rules only make sense if you understand the Unix shell" imply learning Make seem intimidating and perhaps even unnecessary..
The excerpt below adds too much complexity.. we're writing in the general case of build tools, but the lesson should be focused on the specific tool of Make
We describe dependencies in a [build file](../../gloss.html#build-file),
which is usually just a plain text file in some specialized format.
What are build tools (this implies a history with complied programming language and an understanding of Make's heritage), plain text files (you mean, MS Word with no formatting?), dependencies (you mean, something I need to download?), specialized formats (I thought it was "plain" text?)
A few stylistic points:
The lead-in example of the robot's example would be easier to follow as bullet points
would be nice to remove some of the parentheses in favour of fuller sentences
The plain text makes it somewhat clear what the author's intention is - for the text to be read as a monologue/lecture, with each line marking a strong pause - but I don't know if this translates perfectly well to prose. The line endings get removed with the Markdown conversion to HTML, making the flow less clear.
Some thoughts about
intermediate/make/00-intro.md..What are build tools (this implies a history with complied programming language and an understanding of Make's heritage), plain text files (you mean, MS Word with no formatting?), dependencies (you mean, something I need to download?), specialized formats (I thought it was "plain" text?)
A few stylistic points: