Name: Pro Git
ISBN: 9781430218333

Pro Git

Pro Gitmis a book that every regular & senior developer should read to fully grasp how Git is working under the hood, the differences between are basing & bargaining, and how to effectively use git functions.

Mateusz Gostanski

Gavin

Neal Stephenson once hyperbolised the situation in OS choice as follows:

  

  Linux is right next door and is not a business at all. It's a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They've been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free. 
  


This is overstated; Debian and Ubuntu, the chief consumer descendents, are as buggy as any other. But the very same people built Git, and it is a battle-tank. Fast, unbreakable and life-saving. Why hasn't it taken over the world, outside of tech industry? 1) most people don't need non-linear incremental backups; 2) the learning curve is bloody steep even for techies.

Entities that you need to know about to use Git without absurdity: the files, the working tree, the index, many local repositories, many remote repositories, 'remotes' (pointers to remote repositories), commits, treeishes (pointers to commits), branches, a stash

"git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space."— chi wai lau (@tabqwerty) March 9, 2011

This book covers so much of the internal detail, the gotchas, the customisability, and comparisons with other source-control systems that it was adopted as canonical docs by the official working group. Skip sections at will, but do have a go.

[Free here]