Now you know how source control works, and you've got a gigantic pile of source code sitting in a directory.

What do you do with it?

The process of turning source code into executable binary code can be extremely complicated. The more source code you have, the more complicated that process is. Almost every serious piece of software has its own build process, that every developer must follow -- and woe be unto the developer who repeatedly breaks the build for everyone else.

In this chapter, you learn about how software is built. You learn about how the build process works in general, about some tools that you are likely to see, and you walk through a build for a FOSS project to see how it works in practice.