Occasionally, in the IT industry, some inventions are made whose value is far beyond their merely technical merit. Git is one of them.
Git is immensely faster and more convenient than SVN, CVS, and TFS. It is fast becoming the defacto standard mainly because there are no tools as powerful and versatile as it is; it is a wonderful masterpiece of code. Behind the success of Git lies much more: it is a revolutionary approach to writing code. Git houses an inherently collaborative component in its DNA. It is no coincidence then that the GitHub's tagline is Social Coding.
If Linus Torvalds goes down in history, it will perhaps be not only for Linux and his genius in writing C, but above all, for the social impact that Git has had on the IT community. Just like the invention of the Web and HTTP have enabled humanity to build a network of communication and collaboration previously unthinkable, Git is the very tool that enables us to transform code development into a social activity. As a matter of fact, Git has started a new era in IT.
Git is also a very well documented tool. If you want to learn the syntax of its 155 commands, you don't need this book; the man pages, which are available for free on the web, are certainly more exhaustive.
However, the heart of Git does not lie in the list of its command options. Just like reading the syntax of the class and interface keywords will hardly make you grasp the deeper meaning of object-oriented programming, in the same way, the essence of Git won't emerge easily from its man pages.
The hardest part of Git is the paradigm shift that it requires. Honestly, very few books that I've read are able to explain Git and the universe that revolves around it, in a simpler way than the one you're holding in your hands.
This book covers not only all the main topics you can find on the man pages with simplicity and synthesis (such as the commit, stash, rebase, and management of remote), but also has the merit of being one of the few books to give you a 360-degree overview of the ecosystem that every pragmatic programmer should master. It explains how to set up a local server, teaches you the theory and practice behind GitHub and pull requests in a simple and practical way, and even contains a step-by-step guide to migrate from SVN to Git.
Git Essentials has another merit: it is built like a huge tutorial, and is a step-by-step journey through the Git universe. It's not an academic paper; on the contrary, it's full of concrete examples, is written by a programmer, and targeted at other programmers.
It is a book that values code much more than words.
Arialdo Martini
Solutions Architect at Aduno Gruppe