Customer Reviews

Pragmatic Version Control Using Git (Pragmatic Starter Kit)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

You hear a lot about GIT in the Ruby and Rails world - which makes you wonder: What is so bad about Subversion?

Turns out, nothing. But GIT has some definite advantages which are clearly and succinctly explained in the book. It doesn't assume previous knowledge about version control systems, which is nice for people just getting their feet wet with this kind of software.

Instead of simply telling you how to do something, it also explains why you would want (or need) to do it. And what problems could arise. And how to work around them.

It also explains how you can start using it yourself, even if the rest of your group is still using Subversion. It turns out that GIT can play quite nicely with that popular piece of software - which should encourage hesitant people to take the plunge.

It's a decent book. It explained the basics really well, but something bothers me: It doesn't cover applying patches! Not even in the reference! That this book doesn't cover a heavily-used feature of git (in collaborative projects) is disappointing.

"Pragmatic" doesn't describe the depth of content, to me. It describes the manner in which the content is presented. The book could have been a bit thicker, with more complete feature coverage, and maintained its title.

Using a modern version control system likely means a choice between Git and Mercurial, which are way ahead of the previous generation (which includes the very popular Subversion). Git is becoming more and more widely used, with lots of open source projects switching to it. Even though quite easy to use for basic things, it takes some effort to learn to master all its features.

Pragmatic Version Control using Git provides most of the information needed, while also being a great starting point if you never used Git. It's written in a tutorial-like fashion, where each topic is covered by through explanations and focused examples (also available for download).

The first part covers Git configuration and very basic operations. The explanation is quite exhaustive, which is very important as it's fundamental to understand the philosophical differences between Git and other software: Subversion, for instance, works quite differently but many folks still try to use Git as if it was Subversion with another name: this is quite a pity, as Git offers much more power and flexibility. This difference is clear when you see that half of the book (90 pages) is only devoted to working with local files, which means that with Git you mostly (even only, in some cases) work locally (compared to Subversion where most of the work involves a remote repository).

The second part covers, besides some notions about how to work with remote repositories, the advanced topics (rewriting revision history, ...). One of the interesting parts is the one which explains how to migrate from, or even interoperate with, Subversion and CVS repositories: very useful if you're considering the switch to Git but you want it to be slow and without pain. Some useful notes on Gitosis (a Git repository manager) and other tools close the book.

A quick reference to everything Pragmatic Version Control using Git explains is available in appendix A, and a single-page cheat sheet you can detach from the book is also provided. These are really welcome, as finding a particular thing in a tutorial-like book like this can be quite boring.

This book is, all in all, a fine choice for learning Git. It might not be the best thing to use as a reference once you learned the topics, still it is acceptable even when used as such.

I had previously purchased TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac (Pragmatic Programmers) from the same publisher, and having been exceptionally happy with that book, I decided that I would turn to the same publisher for my in-depth Git help. I purchased the PDF download of the book directly from the publisher, as I tend to prefer, but the things that bother me would also apply to the print edition.

While Swicegood's book did answer a few questions I'd had about Git, I've found the information in its pages is barely more than I would have picked up from a 1-hour immersion in the features I had not yet used. Since purchasing the book, I have read one chapter thoroughly, skimmed another, and found the others almost useless. The Git cheat sheets online I have referred to -- and the man pages most of all -- have been much more useful in learning the more advanced features of Git. Were the book half its price, it might be more worth it, but at this price, it's just too light on actual, usable content.

This book was an excellent introduction to Git. The author went into good detail of the basic uses of Git and made it exciting to try it. I have referred to the book almost daily since reading it. I definitely recommend it for the average user. My only wish is that the book had gone into more detail of git's administrative features.

I've read several books from the Pragmatic Bookshelf and I've always liked their approach of sticking to the relevant bits while being easy to read, and, in general, offering more than the official product manual. This apple didn't fall far from the tree.

"Pragmatic Version Control Using Git" is a compact tutorial into the world of distributed version control systems and, of course, Git in particular. The book starts with a gentle introduction to concepts that might not be familiar to a reader coming from the world of centralized version control systems such as CVS and Subversion.

After familiarizing the reader with commits, branches, tags, Git's index, the difference between local and remote repositories, and so forth, the author walks us through day-to-day kind of operations. The walkthrough explains the before-mentioned concepts quite well and I had no trouble following the command listings and the narrative, although I would've liked to see illustrations of the local repository's contents along the way - similar to what the author employed when introducing the concepts.

All in all, this book is a very good introduction to the world of distributed version control using Git - it packs pretty much everything that's necessary for a new Git user. Where I feel it's slightly lacking is in administration, i.e. how to set up a Git server for your team or company. The author does walk you through installing a Gitosis server but I'm still left feeling like there's more I should know.

Again, a very good introduction and warmly recommended to anyone looking to move to Git and into the world of distributed version control.

I have been a fan of Travis Swicegood's work for a while now. He not only has the ability to write good software, but he can also talk about it. Travis' latest work, Pragmatic Version Control Using Git, is an excellent introduction into the world of distributed version control with Git. For a long time I've been a Subversion user, and for a while now Git has been getting a lot of good press. Like anyone who wants to use the best tools available I often wondered if the grass was greener on the Git side. Travis addresses the advantages Git has over SVN (and he even shows you how to use Git with SVN), which should help you in derterming the color of your version control grass. If you want to investigate what Git can do for you, not only will this book provide an excellent introduction, but it will also provide a great reference. I recommend this one for your bookshelf.

##The Parts I Liked##

These days I don't have a lot of time for books that fail to get to the good stuff quickly. This book is a quick read and gets right to the point. It starts with an introduction and moves right into the steps needed to set up this version control system. From there it moves quickly into creating a project and working directly with Git.

Git has a very rich feature set which could overwhelm a new user. Travis does a nice job distilling the details down to exactly what you need to know, while including material later on in the book for users with more advanced needs. Topics include, among other things: tags, branches, history, remote branches, best practices, and advanced topics. Since I'm not one for repeating what you can find elsewhere, take a look at the full table of contents for a complete list of topics.

In addition to the topics previously mentioned, the book also has administrative and appendixes sections. These sections alone are worth the price tag for this book. Topics include:

* Migrating to Git
* Running a Git Server with Gitosis
* A Git Command Quick Reference
* Other Resources and Tools

## The Parts I Struggled With ##

Although I stand by my 5 rating for this book, everything didn't go as smoothly as I would have liked. Namely, I had a bit of a difficult time setting up Gitosis. Everything was fine until I had to initialize gitosis. At this point things started going wrong for me (Ubuntu 8.04 is what I tested with). I'm sorry that I can't provide better details, as it has been a month since I struggled with this part of the book. Admittedly, I didn't put much of an effort into setting up Gitosis. GitHub currently meets and exceeds all my Git hosting needs. When the time comes for me to have the need for private git repositories, I'll revisit Gitosis.

## Conclusion ##

For a long time I've been using Subversion for version control. In the short time I've been using Git, it has become my version control system of choice. As far as I'm concerned, it has lived up to the hype. Like anything else there is a bit of a learning curve with Git, however with resources such as this book you'll hit the ground running. Not only that, but this book is really nice to have for the inevitable need of a refresher.

If you like quick reads, packed with nuggets of very useful information, knowing full well that you'll eventually need access to more advanced topics, than this might very well be the perfect Git book for you.