17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great resource on learning Git quickly, December 29, 2008
This review is from: Pragmatic Version Control Using Git (Pragmatic Starter Kit) (Paperback)
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Git:
- It explains concepts clearly and succinctly without being dry
- It's short: you can go through this book in a day or two.
- It succeeds in explaining what Git is and what the main most useful features are without going into unnecessary details. For anything in depth, Git manual is an excellent complementary source of information.
- The book organized in a way that reminds me of classic K&R "The C Programming Language": a short introductory tutorial showcasing main tools and then more in-depth explanation of these tools in the following chapters. I find this type of organization to be most conductive to my learning process.
The book has proven to be very useful to me in getting up to speed on Git quickly and deserves a 5 star rating.
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good book, but somewhat disappointing.., March 18, 2009
This review is from: Pragmatic Version Control Using Git (Pragmatic Starter Kit) (Paperback)
it's wonderful to have a book on git out early. it's a great way to get started with git. the amount of content is somewhat skimpy. that's fine. i don't necessarily prefer books that are voluminous. but you get to the end of the book and you've gone through all of the examples and you get this sense that you haven't really grokked it. i just watched the youtube video of linus' speech on git at google, and i left with an understanding of the essence of git that i feel i didn't get from the book.
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24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
not as good as the free alternatives, January 17, 2009
This review is from: Pragmatic Version Control Using Git (Pragmatic Starter Kit) (Paperback)
The first good news is that amazon is selling this book at a 33% discount compared to the price listed on the publisher's web site. Even the discounted price strikes me as pretty pricey for a 180-page trade paperback, but at least it's a little more within reason.
I found the design of the book a little annoying and amateurish. It has an odd squarish shape, and the margins are goofy -- gigantic outside margins, and razor-thin top and bottom margins. Visually, it makes my eye feel like I'm about to fall off the bottom of the page when I get to the end of a page.
The book is hot off the presses as of January 2009, and that's a good thing for a book documenting software that's relatively new and rapidly changing.
The real question in my mind is whether it was a good thing that I spent my money on this printed book, rather than just using the wealth of free, online documentation available from links at Git's homepage. The free documentation includes Unix manpages, a user's manual, a tutorial, a wiki, and a community book. In one of my first attempts to use the book to get started with Git, I ran into a mistake, and had to go to the online information to get the right information. (The book tells you to "make install," when in fact what you need to do is "make prefix=/usr/local install.)
I dislike the way the author presents the information. He has a tendency to rely on a combination of inexact metaphors and cookbook-style instructions. This left me with an uneasy feeling that I didn't understand exactly what I was doing, or why. The Wikipedia article on Git actually gave me a much better understanding of the general design philosophy of git and the basics of how it works and how it differs from other version control systems.
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