Scott Chacon

The book is fairly short -- 9 chapters, around 300 pages. The first three chapters are pretty good for a beginner / intermediate user of git. The fourth chapter talks about server-side usage of git (including gitweb, github.com, etc.) and is pretty information sparse. The fifth chapter gives vague suggestions of git workflows in a team. The sixth and seventh chapters go into a little more detail about intermediate git usage and customization. The eighth chapter is entirely devoted to git show more interacting with svn and perforce. And the 9th chapter goes into incredible detail of git as a "content-addressable filesystem" with some decent examples and explanations of git internals and the .git directory. Overall this book is so unfocused as to not be worth buying for your shelf. show less

A reasonably clear introduction and explanation of git. The first part does a good job at explaining things for new users, and is especially good at pointing out saner ways to do things that were added in recent versions of git. It seemed to cover most of the stuff I've learned the hard way, and I found one or two new things. The only glaring omission is it didn't seem to cover git reset at all.

The chapter on managing a project with git covered problems I'm just starting to encounter, so was show more appreciated. The section on subprojects showed all their many warts; candor appreciated. The coverage of subtree merging was entirely new to me and very interesting to see. The final chapter on internals does a good job of really getting down and dirty at both the git database and wire protocol levels.

The only things I didn't like were some slightly shady bits of sysadmin advice. In at least two places the user is advised to set up things in an insecure way. (I hope to get these corrected.) In other places the user is walked through cloning a project from git and manually installing it -- even though apt-get is used to install other things on sometimes the same page. show less

Good coverage of the core technologies and principles you need to master git. Be aware of the title. It's not necessarily a good introduction to Git unless you like digging into the details. I read it after I already had some experience, and it's helped to fill in some gaps in my knowledge.

This is a superb book for understanding git. I had some basic experience with git but this has explained so much more to me. It contains the basics and also a variety of advanced topics (which I did end up skimming through but I know where to go back to if I need to). Includes coverage of running a local repository, branching, merging, various options for working with others, using github as a contributor and a maintainer, a deep dive into the internals of git and more.