what is a parallel "make"
 

I'm going to install BIND, and when reading the README file on how to build it mentioned to do a ./configure and then make. It said to not do a parallel "make". what does this mean?

I'm not sure about the use of this expression since I have not seen the context in which is was used but ... I wonder if it means not to do this:
<code>
./configure --prefix=PATH_TO_DIR && make && su -c 'make install"
</code>
The && allow the program to keep on going if the previous command did not return an error.

Hope this helps.

R.

Parallel make is a version of make that multi-threads. It is designed for multi-processor machines.

I would assume the problem here would be if it "made" some parts out of order (being in different threads) the resultant executable would not work (or work incorrectly).

I think you can do a parallel make with the -j option of make.
make -j8 config will execute 8 jobs in parallel for "making" the config. You can see this happening in a watch window.