makefiles

Hi All,

I would like to know more about makefiles.  So far I just used them to
compile providers.

what else we can do with make files?
Can we use them to install providers? If so, please point me to any reading
materials/examples you might know of

The idea behind my quesiton is,  we will have bunch of providers (.so) files
that would like to install at a particular directory path [ we need to
create directories as well] on client sites.

Thanks.