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A Hacker’s Guide to Git

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Re: A Hacker’s Guide to Git

#21

Post by oneandoneis2 »

collyw wrote: post #19
EinLama wrote: post #2

I'd recommend another guide. "Pro Git" by Scott Chacon is excellent and welcomes patches, source for the book and its translations are on GitHub http://www.git-scm.com/book

I appreciate that git is powerful, but should we really need to read a book just to get the best from a source control system? It seems overly complex to me at times (any time I do anything outside of my usual workflow). Version control only makes up a part of the whole development process, and plenty of coders out there manage without any at all.

IME the main thing that makes git so hard to understand is the determination to think of it as "distributed subversion" - I find it substantially easier to teach git to people who've never used a VCS before than to people who have years of experience with SVN/CVS/etc.

It can seem a complicated nightmare until you grok how it really works. And if you have preconceptions getting in your way, yes, a book can be a very useful tool to give you that "Aha!" moment.

Once you stop someone thinking "It's a log of patches" and make them understand "It's like VM snapshots logged in a linked list" all the weird difficult stuff just Makes Sense.

Re: A Hacker’s Guide to Git

#22

Post by daigoba66 »

EinLama wrote: post #2

I'd recommend another guide. "Pro Git" by Scott Chacon is excellent and welcomes patches, source for the book and its translations are on GitHub http://www.git-scm.com/book

This is the book which gave me my "ah-ha!" moment years ago. Everything clicked and suddenly git was, relatively, easy. I think a key to highly successful usage is understanding how git models the world of which this book does a wonderful job teaching.

Re: A Hacker’s Guide to Git

#23

Post by erikb »

anton_gogolev wrote: post #3

How many more tutorials on Git do we need? It's like article authors find it a "rite of passage" of sorts to explain Content-Addressable Storage, references and all kinds of whacky command-line keys.

The way you expressed your concern is not very polite, but otherwise I have to agree. There are already thousands of tutorials about Git's fundamentals. It would be great if people like this article's author would spend their (actually quite good) skills into creating something new or improving the existing material instead of redoing work that is already done in all variations.

Re: A Hacker’s Guide to Git

#24

Post by egil »

collyw wrote: post #19
EinLama wrote: post #2

I'd recommend another guide. "Pro Git" by Scott Chacon is excellent and welcomes patches, source for the book and its translations are on GitHub http://www.git-scm.com/book

I appreciate that git is powerful, but should we really need to read a book just to get the best from a source control system? It seems overly complex to me at times (any time I do anything outside of my usual workflow). Version control only makes up a part of the whole development process, and plenty of coders out there manage without any at all.

Git was originally created to manage the Linux kernel. It is indeed complex, but it has to be at that scale. Git might not be the best option for every project, but I find it quite easy to use at the trivial scale as well. (How do you beat 'git init' ? No repository setup or anything.)

Re: A Hacker’s Guide to Git

#25

Post by boomlinde »

anton_gogolev wrote: post #3

How many more tutorials on Git do we need? It's like article authors find it a "rite of passage" of sorts to explain Content-Addressable Storage, references and all kinds of whacky command-line keys.

Upvote because I think it's a perfectly valid point, but in my experience a wide range of perspectives on even simple things can be helpful to beginners and professionals alike.

Re: A Hacker’s Guide to Git

#26

Post by ams6110 »

egil wrote: post #24
collyw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate that git is powerful, but should we really need to read a book just to get the best from a source control system? It seems overly complex to me at times (any time I do anything outside of my usual workflow). Version control only makes up a part of the whole development process, and plenty of coders out there manage without any at all.

Git was originally created to manage the Linux kernel. It is indeed complex, but it has to be at that scale. Git might not be the best option for every project, but I find it quite easy to use at the trivial scale as well. (How do you beat 'git init' ? No repository setup or anything.)

I'm not so convinced. Other OSes manage with more "primitive" tools. OpenBSD still use CVS.

Re: A Hacker’s Guide to Git

#27

Post by BugBrother »

ams6110 wrote: post #26
egil wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git was originally created to manage the Linux kernel. It is indeed complex, but it has to be at that scale. Git might not be the best option for every project, but I find it quite easy to use at the trivial scale as well. (How do you beat 'git init' ? No repository setup or anything.)

I'm not so convinced. Other OSes manage with more "primitive" tools. OpenBSD still use CVS.

Isn't OpenBSD a special case? Most really security conscious organizations seem to use outdated tools, because the new tools haven't been vetted/verified/etc yet.

(That is one reason I stay away from security work. The theory is fascinating, but the practice is just not fun.)

Re: A Hacker’s Guide to Git

#28

Post by jammycakes »

What disappoints me most about this, as well as almost every other Git tutorial that I've seen, is that it uses the command line almost exclusively. Even those tutorials that I've seen that do refer to GUI options pay lip service to them at best.

This is a shame because I personally found GUI front ends for Git and Mercurial critical to understanding how they work in the first place, and in fact some tasks (such as advanced branch manipulation or hunk selection as with git add -p) are considerably harder with the command line than with GUI tools, simply because the command line doesn't give you a full enough picture of what you're doing.

Re: A Hacker’s Guide to Git

#29

Post by benesch »

morsch wrote: post #13
EinLama wrote: post #2

I'd recommend another guide. "Pro Git" by Scott Chacon is excellent and welcomes patches, source for the book and its translations are on GitHub http://www.git-scm.com/book

For what it's worth, Pro Git doesn't really need recommendation, it's the first Google hit for half of my git related queries...

It's easy to mistake Pro Git as some sort of official Git reference when Googling, since it's hosted at

    http://git-scm.com/book
and looks an awful lot like the online man pages (git-scm.com/docs).

And so, without an explicit recommendation, it's easy to miss out on its well-organized narrative, or its superb ninth chapter, Git Internals, which explains the "why?" of Git and is probably one's best shot at grokking Git. (See parent's sibling comments for evidence.)

Re: A Hacker’s Guide to Git

#30

Post by mrcsparker »

jammycakes wrote: post #28

What disappoints me most about this, as well as almost every other Git tutorial that I've seen, is that it uses the command line almost exclusively. Even those tutorials that I've seen that do refer to GUI options pay lip service to them at best. This is a shame because I personally found GUI front ends for Git and Mercurial critical to understanding how they work in the first place, and in fact some tasks (such as a…

What git gui do you recommend?
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