Git

Pro Git by Scott Chacon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am now totally convinced that those people that rave about git and complain bitterly about 'traditional' version control systems are absolutely right. Git is a revolution! Not a new one but one I'm just coming to grips with.


I decided to read this whole book even though I'm just a newbie just so I had an idea of the breadth of topics and different features. I'll be sticking with basic usage but I can go back and reference the advanced topics later. I did skim read some of those topics, no need to read advanced scripts when I won't be using those.

The main take out for me for the advantages of git are:
- ability to save all your work in a logical manner (in topic branches) before you do any commit. There is no good solution to this in the tools I'm used to except for a manual save to a network drive or offline storage
- flexible workflow - there are many many ways to set up your workflow, including code review, integration, qa and many other steps you may or may not want
- let you use github, a great way to backup and share your work, more likely for personal projects but could also be great for company use in some cases
- the inner workings are completely exposed so you have the power to do many custom workflows, enforcement of particular policies and so on
- bundling of commits into logical groupings with options and many options for handling these well
- great tools for finding out why some code went wrong, pinpointing which check in or which tag created the fault

Changing from a traditional tool to git would be a major undertaking but well worth the effort.

The ebook is available free here:
Pro Git eBook

A couple of other indespsible resources for learning git:
Simple work flow
Herding Code Podcast on Git for Windows developers

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