Thanks for bringing this up.

I would think the main reason to create an archive is for reproducibility of results. If you have an archive of the results and plots, along with the code and method used to generate them (i.e. the makefile), then you have a self-contained record of what you did. Furthermore it is easy to re-run your analysis to reproduce the results. I suppose the advantage of this in addition to versioning your code, is that the input, code, methodology, and output are all saved in one place.

1. I don't see that it matters where you store the archive. I see it as personal preference, like any filing system. Within the make-lesson directory is one of the logical choices.
2. I'm a bit unclear as to what isn't clear. The exercise indicates that all steps should be automated using the Makefile:

Add new rules, update existing rules, and add new macros to:

Thanks for the response. I'll do a pull request with a couple changes to this exercise that you can check out and see if my edits make sense.

Another minor problem with the final exercise -- perhaps this should be a separate issue -- but the solution Makefile does not recreate the books directory or copy the books .txt files into the new archive directory. Is that intended? It seems that the raw data should be copied over to the archive as well. I found it hard to copy the text files for the books into a new directory called books in the archive directory using the $(TXT_FILES) variable. That's because this includes the directory name. Another option would be to use rsync to copy into the new archive file.

Gerard, thanks so much for the tutorial. I learned a lot. Definitely enough to start using Make today.
All the episodes were great. I wish had known about Make during my dissertation!