Jim Weirich has started writing what promises to be an excellent series of Rake tutorials (Getting Started and Handling Common Actions).

Rake is a Ruby build program that rhymes with make, but for all intents and purposes that’s where the similarity ends. Rake’s built-in tasks read like a mini build language and because Rakefiles are defined in standard Ruby syntax, you have all the power of a genuine object-oriented language with which to do automation galore.

Yum.