Professional CMake: A Practical Guide

Author(s): Craig Scott

Year: 2018

The handbook for every CMake user, providing structured learning, the latest best practices and real-world advice from one of the CMake co-maintainers.
Attempting to use any tool before understanding at least the basics of what it does and how it is meant to be used is most likely going to result in frustration. On the other hand, spending all one’s time learning the theory about something without getting hands-on makes for a rather boring experience and often leads to an overly idealistic understanding. This first part of the book follows a logical progression through CMake’s more fundamental features and concepts and is structured to enable the reader to immediately experiment and to do increasingly useful things with each chapter.
The goal is to incrementally build up the base knowledge needed to use CMake effectively, with an emphasis on being able to put that knowledge into practice right away. The initial focus in the first few chapters is on building a basic executable or library, covering just enough to give a new developer a quick introduction to CMake. Subsequent chapters expand that knowledge to demonstrate how to get the most out of what CMake has to offer. The techniques presented are aimed at real world use, with the intention of establishing good habits and teaching sound methods which scale to very large projects and can handle more complex scenarios. The later parts of the book all rely heavily on the material covered in this first part. Those who have already been using CMake for some time may find the topics relatively familiar, but the material also includes hard-won knowledge from real world projects and interaction with the CMake community. Even experienced users should find at least the Recommended Practices section at the end of each chapter to be a us