The Make program was written to reduce the tedium involved in developing software. A program under development usually needs to be recompiled many times per day. Typing out the full command line for each step of the compilation becomes exceedingly tedious, and a shell script is too crude to figure out the most efficient way to recompile a large set of source files. The Make program suits this purpose well.
With a properly written Makefile in the current directory, all that needs to be typed to build the project under development is make. To build only a subset of the project defined in the Makefile, simply type make goalname, where goalname is the name of the goal, that requires rebuilding. The actual dependencies that must be checked and the commands which must be executed are all taken care of in the Makefile and the builtin rules.