Project dependencies

I made a thread on /g/ about this and they suggested I try asking you guys as well.

I want to emulate a feature currently found in visual studio using the unix way but I don't know how.

I made a bunch of C libraries for data structures and a few projects that uses them. I want to make it so every time I compile the projects it will also compile their dependencies. That way, I can work on both my project and the libraries and have any changes propagated immediately and automatically.

Here's the feature:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/et61xzb3.aspx

Can /prog/ help me with this? I'm not familiar with make.

Here's my project structure:

~/code/
  list/
    include/           # should be automatically added to compiler include path
      list.h
    source/
      list.c
    build/
      objects/
        list.o
      output/          # should be automatically added to compiler include path
          liblist.so
    build              # builds all code in the project, generating the build/ directory
  application/
    include/           # should be automatically added to compiler include path
      application.h
    source/
      application.c
    build/
      objects/
        application.o
      output/
        application
    build              # builds all code in the project, generating the build/ directory
                       # attempts to build ~/code/list first because it's a dependency

makefiles?

You got a practical example on how to achieve this with makefiles?

Install gentoo GNU/linux

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=makefile+dependencies