Skip to main content

Pragmatic Version Control using Git

Image
By
Travis Swicegood
ISBN-13: 978-1934356159

I was an early adopter of Subversion after having used CVS for a little while. I've come rather late to the Git party and I wanted a book that would give me a quick, yet solid, introduction. Pragmatic Version Control using Git is just such a book. I really like the Pragmatic Programmer books as they tend to be short and easy to read. They allow me to absorb a lot of information in a very short period of time.

The first thing that struck me was the brilliant simplicity of the example code. Many books on version control use Java as a language that is easily understood by most people. Even with Java you need a fair bit of code before you've got a program that does anything, even Hello, World! Swicegood uses HTML as his example code. This is perfect because everyone can understand it easily and you only need a little to do some interesting things. The HTML example is used throughout the book, in my opinion, very successfully.

Git itself took me a little by surprise. Having a local copy of the whole repository felt a little extravagant at first and it took me a while to get my head around the idea of having to add a file every time I want to commit it, even if I've committed a previous revision. However, Swicegood explains how and why you do both of these very well and now I see the benefit of local copies of a repository and having a staging area.

Branching is key to Git and Swicegood explains it in a lot of detail. The book closes with a chapter on Subversion and CVS integration and migration with Git and a chapter on setting up a Git server. The only disappointment for me was the sparse descriptions of GUI clients. I am totally addicted to TortoiseSVN and would have liked to have seen a Git equivalent explained in some detail.

Available on the Kindle here.

Comments

  1. Russel Winder19 August 2011 at 18:53

    Investigate 'git commit -m "..." -a'

    ReplyDelete
  2. Russel Winder19 August 2011 at 18:55

    I use 'gitg --all &' to get a graphical view of the repository but otherwise use the command line.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Do software engineering professionals still read? - survey results

By
  In order to gauge the potential audience for my book, So you think you can lead a team? , I conducted a small survey of my colleagues, co-workers and anyone from Linked. I read regularly, for work and pleasure, and assumed everyone else did too but did the responses I received confirm this? I polled 173 people, all within the software engineering field (including Product, etc), with a range of ages and years of experience in their role. What surprised me the most was that the majority of people, young or old, just starting or seasoned, still prefer reading physical books to blogs or e-readers. It also seemed that the older and more experienced were the most keen in learning more, and reading to expand or update their knowledge.  When it comes to reading habits between different roles the survey showed that software engineers and team leads read more regularly for their career than other roles, with 55 years old and over and 16+ years experience being the biggest readers over...
3 comments
Read more