Version Control with Git: Powerful tools and techniques for collaborative software development

I've been using Git for my side projects for nearly a year now, based primarily on knowledge I scraped together through conference sessions, screen-casts and cheat sheets. This is how a lot of people seem to get started with Git, but at some point it becomes necessary to really understand how it's working and what some of the more advanced commands are for.This book was exactly the right next step for me, moving me from stumbling around in Git to really understanding it. The author accomplishes this by taking the time to cover Git internals and to build on your knowledge as the book progresses. At first, I resisted all the plumbing explanations, since I doubt I'll be contributing to Git itself, but after a chapter or two it becomes obvious that understanding what Git is doing internally is pretty important to understanding how to interact with it. Additionally, the internals are always explained from a layman's perspective and never get so nuanced that they distract from the topic area being covered.The book is organized so that you slowly build up knowledge of how Git works, with many topic areas sort of split into a basic and advanced chapter. This was a bit annoying at first, but since the more advanced topics require you to understand other aspects of the tool first, it's necessary. As an example, you need to understand diffs, branching and merges before you can worry about patches, and you need to understand branching and merging before you can worry about remotes.The book also ends with a decent overview of how to use Git with SVN, which is still pretty important given that a lot of organizations will be relying on SVN for quite some time. Unfortunately, this is one of the few areas that could have used a bit more coverage and seemed to lack the basic and advanced topic setup that worked so well for the rest of the book.It also doesn't provide much in the way of best practices for employing Git, although I don't see this as a weakness. The closest it comes to recommending a strategy to use it with your team is to kind of sketch out how some very high-profile open source projects work with the tool, which is unlikely to directly apply. Fortunately, there's a lot of content on the Web that covers use cases, branching strategies and best practices, so you won't have trouble finding this information elsewhere. The author doesn't take an opinion on such topics, instead focusing on how to make Git do what you want once you've decided on how you want to use it.In the end, I recommend this book to anybody who has decided that Git is going to be their DVCS and intends to read the book sequentially, cover to cover. If you're still trying to decide between Mercurial, Bazaar and Git, this is probably a lot more information than you want or require. If you're looking for a quick reference, then the progressive structure may leave you scratching your head when jumping around topic areas.Once you settle on Git, and want to invest the time to build up the conceptual framework you'll need to succeed with it, this book won't disappoint.

I was already using Git at a superficial level mainly to review the work of my programming team, and this book has raised my understanding of the process. I have now gifted everyone in the team a copy.It talks a lot about "How" Git does certain things and "Why" it does those things, instead of simply focusing on "What" it does. For those coming from an SVN background, like myself, it periodically has asides explaining how Git differs from SVN and other version control systems. In accordance with the design principle of "Separation of mechanism and policy", the book often explains Git functionality and then offers different ways in which that functionality can be applied. It does not recommend a particular way of doing everything but explains the choices available. The user can then determine a policy that best fits their needs.I believe that programmers and managers who are already using Git at some level, and those having a computer science background, will find this particularly useful and enjoyable. The examples are easy to follow, and while they are contrived for simplicity, they are also representative of real life usage.

Solid discussion of Git for someone like me who has primarily been using CVS and SVN (Subversion) throughout their career, and has since started using Git. While I do not view this book as the "train wreck" that the top reviewer here describes, be aware that if you are completely new to version control systems (VCS) you will likely want to look elsewhere (at least for introductory explanations), because the authors jump right into Git usage without first providing much VCS background information.After a cursory Git introduction, the authors provide what I consider the core of the text (the first 14 chapters of 21), covering installation, how to get started, basic Git concepts, file management, the Git index, commits, branches, diffs, merges, altering commits, the stash, the reflog, remote repositories, repository management, and patches. After this core, the discussion turns to hooks, combining projects, submodule best practices, using Git with SVN repositories, advanced manipulations, tips/tricks/techniques, and use of GitHub (although I decided to skip a couple of these latter chapters, such as the one on hooks, because I do not plan to use this feature in the near future).Working through this book, I especially appreciated the diagrams (which explain Git objects and commit graphs) and the high number of working examples (of which I recently executed about 90% or so). The diagrams which explain branching and merging are the types of diagrams typical colleagues and I white board with each other to explain a given project state, helping enable both understanding of the material as well as providing future reference for visual depiction.One of the reasons I decided to go with this book to get more familiar with Git, other than the fact that there are not many Git texts of which to choose in the marketplace, is because it was published relatively recently relative to when I purchased it about a year ago. Unfortunately, a potentially better book called "Pro Git (Second Edition)" that other reviewers have mentioned has since been published, something that happens when a book is not read soon after purchase.Be aware that while almost every single example that I executed over the course of working through this book ran flawlessly (somewhat of a rarity with technology texts), I did notice on a few occasions that the command line output from a handful of commands was slightly different than what was represented in the material, and I attribute this to a lack of alignment between the Git version that the authors used (1.7.9) and what I used (2.1.4), downloaded as part of Cygwin. However, this aspect did not distract from the material presented by Loeliger and McCullough.Although the chapter on installation (Chapter 2) does briefly mention the Git version that the authors used, the remainder of the book really does not address this topic apart from a few isolated instances. For example, the chapter on remote repositories (Chapter 12) mentions that differing versions will display a remote-tracking branch differently. When executing another example in the same chapter, I came across a warning that gets displayed when pushing to the depot because the implicit value of "push.default" was changed in Git 2.0 from "matching" to "simple". And although minor, an attempt to clone the 1.5.x branch of SVN referenced in the chapter on using Git with SVN repositories resulted in a "repository moved temporarily" message (the most recent stable version of SVN is currently 1.8.13).In general, however, this book provides a solid discussion of Git, and these are all but minor annoyances. A review of Git itself is not the purpose of a Git book review, but if you are at a point where you have solely heard about Git from colleagues who recommend that Git should be used because "it's cool" or remark that "all you really need to know are like three commands, don't worry about the other stuff" (I have actually heard developers make these types of comments), diving into Git with regard to what is happening under the covers is arguably the right way to go, and this book can help.

good book, o'reily quality

This is simply the best git learning resource which I've yet come across. So many git books and howtos just work from a top-down standpoint: "if you want to do so-and-so, then run this git command" - which works for a while, until something breaks, and the user doesn't know how to fix it. This book takes a solidly bottom-up approach - starting with the structures that git uses, and the low-level commands which can be used to examine and understand them. Only when this foundation has been put in place do the authors start to look at the main git commands and operations. The text is well-written and readable, and there are numerous examples - which work! One of the best books from O'Reilly (which is saying a lot).

Easy to understand and follow.Good for those who want to star learning about git.

Very chaming and elegant, and also belle built to overcome normal life events. As it is with most things coming from Italy.

Lesenwertes Handbuch zu git. Der Autor geht nicht nur auf die alltäglichen Befehle ein, sondern erläutert auch, wie git unter der Motorhaube arbeitet, was den einen oder anderen ungewohnten Arbeitsschritt verständlich macht.