Git Essentials: Developer's Guide to Git

Having actually purchased and read this book, it is a darn good book. Having worked with Git/GitHub for several years, this book helped clear the fog that other books such as Pro Git, published by Apress, simply could not. It explains things in a very clear manner without overloading you with a plethora of details. It provides a good foundation in learning about Git. I'm glad I bought and read it.

A simple book, filled with the latest and greatest on Git Commands. Wish it had an Index.

Great read and reference for Git!

I needed a useful guide on how to use Git. Having sat through three separate one-day long classes on using Git over the past half dozen years or so, i was not impressed with the description of the architecture i received from those classes, the nomenclature choices by the developers, nor the philosophy of how it is used in detail (to say nothing of the bugs in its actual functionality). As a quarter century developer of an operations toolkit, i have been repeatedly surprised that the community has adopted such a flawed toolset (and, yes, my employer makes me use it, though the version control and configuration management tools that i wrote for doing that were perfectly adequate). That said, something like Git is needed to collaborate in the web-centered world of today (but it should have been written to be easier to use). The above notices of conflict of viewpoint set aside, Dupire needs his editors and proofers to do their job. At least three grammatical or spelling errors in the first 10 pages, one false statement about the identicality of version control and configuration management, and a false statement about an example provided ... have made me extremely distrustful of the rest of the text. I don't read his text any more ... just look at the examples and see if they make sense. Regardless, i have not thrown it away because there are quite a number of examples laced throughout the book, and just the other day i stumbled across a snippet that helped me advance one step along the way to trying to resolve a problem with dealing with a multi-file, multi-project, arguably stale repository. Unfortunately, that one step that Dupire helped me with didn't solve the problem that Git could not get over -- problems surrounding the differences between the master and local repositories from the locally implemented Git server ... so i had to junk the repository and start with a fresh clone, copying files, carefully checking update dates ... loads of extra tedious work. But that latter point, of course, is not Dupire's book's fault. Better than nothing as a reference, but if your bank account doesn't have as many digits as you'd like, consider looking elsewhere. Someone needs to write a good, hierarchical and understandable guide on Git ... and this one is not it. But how many Git books does one have to buy to find that (i own 3)?

I’m giving this book 5 stars but I still think it should be paired with other books about Git and they would provide a good complement. My reasoning is that some topics are presented with a focus on irrelevant details and this can be something of a distraction. E.G. When discussing merges, the author elaborates on how git works behind the scene rather than simply explain how the files of their working repo will change or update.