Git Pocket Guide: A Working Introduction (Greyscale Indian Edition)

I wrote a good review after I had had the book for a little while. But now I've got used to using git I hate this book and changed my review.The only reason I thought it was good was because I didn't understand git. This book is unnecessarily complicated, and quite often actually misleading because of the way it phrases things. It is neither a good introduction to git, nor a good overview of git's ethos, nor a cook-book, nor a detailed how-to. It is a little of each, but not good at any.The how-to's won't be exactly what you want, and their explinations will leave out enough detail to be dangerous. Twice I've lost my days work, and gone on-line to find out how to retreive it... that's a bit too ironic for my taste, especially at 2am.It does contain a list of commands, but those references just point to pages that mention the command in some other context.I remember spending an hour trying to figure out how to go back to the last commit without removing that commit, and ended up loosing my work. There are several ways but I just couldn't be sure what the differences were. Eventually I googled it and all became clear in 5mins.If you know what you are doing already you can get excellent git command details and how-to's online.If you want to understand git this book will slow you down; buy a more complete book instead.

This book serves no-one.People new to git will not find an easy introduction to the concepts. Advanced learners will surely buy something more meaty.The author jumps from (rare) day-to-day use cases into details of advanced or even administrative use cases that nobody would expect to be covered in such a succinct publication.Take the chapter Viewing History, where the "git log" command is first formally introduced. It starts at page 127 (yes, more than halfway into the book, after a very few advanced mentions in passing, including "git log --first-parent" at page 21 or how to enable color output on page 36). The author writes that the man page for that is 30 pages long, and that he is not going to repeat all the details. What follows is not 30, but 21 pages on git log, where you learn factoids like the option --perl-regex, and the fact that it's only enabled if you build git yourself with option --with-libpcre. Go figure.

A very disorganised book with a weird set of priorities. Generally I find O'Reilly books are exemplary. For example, the R Graphics Cookbook by Winston Chang is probably the single most useful computer book I have ever read. Three pages into "Getting started" I read: "When referring directly to an object identifier it is not usually necessary to quote the entire 40-character SHA-1 value". Well that's a relief, but we haven't even created an empty repository yet. And why importing an existing projects before creating one is also strange, as is why "Ignoring files" is part of getting started.There is much more that is similar.

Maybe 2 is harsh - but 3 OK is too generous - so 2-and-a-half. The free online material - the Pro Git pdf and others - is better. I think a lot of readers will be in the spot where I was, where I was familiar with git having used every other SM for years and years, and wanted an "instant up-to-speed" to use Git in serious anger on a new all-git contract. This book was no help, but the online material eventually got me up the curve, with help from patient friends.

Overall this is a nice pocket guide. Can't complain.