Almost every time when I wanted to learn to use make it would seem to me that you would need a dozen of object files to justify the use of a makefile and I always ended up with a long list of notes without knowing what to do with it…
It’s only yesterday when I realized that I can use make to automate some simpler but repetitive tasks such as generating assembly files (so I don’t have to do cc -S file.c every time). I also realized that make is not tied to only programming tasks and you can use it with other programs such as pdflatex to generate other files. Finally, make is very helpful when it comes to cleaning up unnecessary files, for example, when you run pdflatex file.tex or if you use make to generate object and assembly files.
A simple introduction to essential make rules can be found here and here.
