Good book on Git

Good book on Git

[Perry E. Metzger]

I found the book "Pro Git" to be very useful when I was trying to
learn Git inside and out.

It is available for free here in a variety of formats:

http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2

and is creative commons licensed.

It has introductory information early on, and later delves into
Git's internals so you can understand exactly what is happening
behind the curtain. (I personally found that part to be helpful -- I
never really have a proper model of something in my head until I know
how it actually works.)


Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com

Re: Good book on Git

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2

  > and is creative commons licensed.

Beware of saying things are "creative commons licensed" as if that
were significant.  There are six Creative Commons licenses.  Two are
free, four are not.  See stallman.org/articles/online-education.html.

Which Creative Commons license does that manual use?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.

Re: Good book on Git

[Perry E. Metzger]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2014 15:53:02 -0500 Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
wrote:
>   > http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2
> 
>   > and is creative commons licensed.
> 
> Beware of saying things are "creative commons licensed" as if that
> were significant.  There are six Creative Commons licenses.  Two are
> free, four are not.  See
> stallman.org/articles/online-education.html.
> 
> Which Creative Commons license does that manual use?
> 

It isn't "free" (it is the non non-commercial variant, and to be
free-as-in-freedom it would need to allow copying for commercial use)
but I was not suggesting this for incorporation into software (which
would not be possible), only that it is a useful reference for people
learning Git. The project has a lot of people who want to learn Git
in a hurry, and it isn't a bad book for that purpose.

BTW, it is more of a textbook than a manual. The Git manuals that
come with Git itself are of course fully free, but they are not always
the easiest introduction.

-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com

Re: Good book on Git

[Filipp Gunbin]

On 15/11/2014 00:32 +0300, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> The Git manuals that come with Git itself are of course fully free,
> but they are not always the easiest introduction.

The git-tutorial pages (1 and 2) provide an easy quickstart help, and
then usual man pages for various commands are good.

-- 
    Filipp

Re: Good book on Git

[Perry E. Metzger]

On Sat, 15 Nov 2014 14:46:50 +0300 Filipp Gunbin
<fgunbin@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On 15/11/2014 00:32 +0300, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> > The Git manuals that come with Git itself are of course fully
> > free, but they are not always the easiest introduction.
> 
> The git-tutorial pages (1 and 2) provide an easy quickstart help,
> and then usual man pages for various commands are good.
> 

Certainly. However, if one is the sort of person who hacks on emacs,
one is also the sort of person who would probably learn quite a bit
about git's model from understanding the underlying infrastructure.

Until I really got how git works, the reason certain things are easy
and certain things are hard, why the tools do what they do, etc., did
not make sense to me.

I think the online book I pointed at does a good job for a
sophisticated user. It also provides a better overview of how
relatively more sophisticated operations with the tools (like
rebasing and such) are best performed.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com

Re: Good book on Git

[Przemysław Wojnowski]

Hello everybody,

When I was learning git I've found the following articles very helpful:
http://www.gitguys.com/topics/

They describe how to use git, what is happening underneath, what are different
types of objects in repository (blob, tree, commit, tag), what's inside .git
directory, etc.
IMHO the articles are very helpful in understanding how git works and how to fix
results of previous, unconscious commands. ;-)

Cheers,
Przemyslaw

Re: Good book on Git

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > It isn't "free" (it is the non non-commercial variant, and to be
  > free-as-in-freedom it would need to allow copying for commercial use)

This shows why the term "Creative-Commons licensed" should be avoided:
because it draws attention away from the most important licensing
question (is it free or not) and focuses it on a side issue (who
published the license).

Focusing attention on freedom is vital no matter what your immediate
purpose.  So please don't ever say "Creative-Commons licensed".
Instead, please state the specific license.  CC-SA-NC is clear and
brief.

  > BTW, it is more of a textbook than a manual.

Please don't think that "manual" means "terse reference that is not
useful as an introduction".  That is just one kind of manual.  Every
free program should have a good introductory manual, too.
If the best git introduction is nonfree, that is very unfortunate.

Who wrote it?  Is there any chance of persuading per to free it?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.

Re: Good book on Git

[Perry E. Metzger]

On Sat, 15 Nov 2014 11:17:33 -0500 Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
wrote:
>   > BTW, it is more of a textbook than a manual.
> 
> Please don't think that "manual" means "terse reference that is not
> useful as an introduction".

Sure, but it usually implies comprehensive listings of features,
command line flags, etc, and this doesn't. The book does not stand
alone without the man pages etc.

> Who wrote it?  Is there any chance of persuading per to free it?

Scott Chacon and Ben Straub wrote it. I don't know either of them,
but you can contact them through the web site.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com

Re: Good book on Git

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > > Who wrote it?  Is there any chance of persuading per to free it?

  > Scott Chacon and Ben Straub wrote it. I don't know either of them,
  > but you can contact them through the web site.

It isn't easy for me to do anything directly through a web site.  Can
you find their email addresses?  If not, I can ask another volunteer
to look.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.

Re: Good book on Git

[Tassilo Horn]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > > Who wrote it?  Is there any chance of persuading per to free it?
>
>   > Scott Chacon and Ben Straub wrote it. I don't know either of them,
>   > but you can contact them through the web site.
>
> It isn't easy for me to do anything directly through a web site.  Can
> you find their email addresses?

It's CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 which is good for educational works though not
compliant to the GNU GPL/FDL according to the GNU list of licenses at
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html.

Anyway, the authors' addresses are those:

  "Scott Chacon" <schacon@gmail.com>
  "Ben Straub" <ben@straub.cc>

The source code of the book is available as a git repository at
https://github.com/progit/progit2.  According to the VCS history, there
are 22 people in total that contributed to the second edition of the
book.

Bye,
Tassilo

Re: Good book on Git

[Werner LEMBERG]

> It's CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 which is good for educational works though not
> compliant to the GNU GPL/FDL according to the GNU list of licenses at
> https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html.

I can't find `BY-NC-SA' in this list.


   Werner

Re: Good book on Git

[Tassilo Horn]

Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org> writes:

>> It's CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 which is good for educational works though not
>> compliant to the GNU GPL/FDL according to the GNU list of licenses at
>> https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html.
>
> I can't find `BY-NC-SA' in this list.

Indeed, there's only "Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.0
license (a.k.a. CC BY-SA)" so wrong version an no NC.

Bye,
Tassilo

Re: Good book on Git

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

Please don't promote nonfree manuals.
See http://gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html.

  > It's CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 which is good for educational works

It's bad for educational works because they should be free.
It also has a serious practical secondary problem, which appears
in cases like this where there are 22 authors.

See stallman.org/articles/online-education.html.

This is something we would naturally want to have in the GNU system,
but we can't use this one, so we need to for people to write a
replacement -- unless we can convice the authors to free it.
I wrote to the authors; thanks for their email addrs.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.

Re: Good book on Git

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Perry.

On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 12:56:40PM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> I found the book "Pro Git" to be very useful when I was trying to
> learn Git inside and out.

> It is available for free here in a variety of formats:

> http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2

> and is creative commons licensed.

> It has introductory information early on, and later delves into
> Git's internals so you can understand exactly what is happening
> behind the curtain. (I personally found that part to be helpful -- I
> never really have a proper model of something in my head until I know
> how it actually works.)

I'm afraid I didn't find it helpful, because it's not searchable.  The
text is fragmented into ~100 smallish web pages, making a systematic
search of one page after another impractical.  If you're looking for the
answer to questions such as "what is the next step after I've done "git
fetch"?" or "what does "git merge" do?" you won't find them here easily.

However, if you're the sort of person who reads this sort of book from
beginning to end, I would think it a good read.

> Perry
> -- 
> Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Re: Good book on Git

[Gregor Zattler]

Hi Alan, emacs developers,
* Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> [16. Nov. 2014]:
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 12:56:40PM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>> http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2

> I'm afraid I didn't find it helpful, because it's not searchable.  The
> text is fragmented into ~100 smallish web pages,

You may clone the git repo and build the book from source with
asciidoctor -b html5.  This produces one single html file.

I had to post process the links to images, though.
 

Ciao, Gregor
-- 
 -... --- .-. . -.. ..--.. ...-.-

Re: Good book on Git

[Perry E. Metzger]

On Sun, 16 Nov 2014 18:00:16 +0000 Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
> I'm afraid I didn't find it helpful, because it's not searchable.
> The text is fragmented into ~100 smallish web pages, making a
> systematic search of one page after another impractical.

Why didn't you download the PDF or use the sources?

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com