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.
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- Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2010
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- jayaichReviewed in the United Kingdom on March 15, 2018
Very good book - useful and in-depth
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