Jesse Liberty - Git for Programmers: Master Git for effective implementation of version control for your programming projects

Git for Programmers

Master Git for effective implementation of version control for your programming projects

Jesse Liberty

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Git for Programmers

Copyright 2021 Packt Publishing

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Producer: Ravit Jain

Acquisition Editor Peer Reviews: Saby Dsilva

Content Development Editor: Alex Patterson

Technical Editor: Gaurav Gavas

Project Editor: Namrata Katare

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Indexer: Pratik Shirodkar

Presentation Designer: Ganesh Bhadwalkar

First published: June 2021

Production reference: 1240621

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Git is powerful, but complex. Many developers, myself included, use it daily but get pretty worried when we get outside of our comfort zones. After that, it's off to copy and paste internet search results and hope for the best Or we might just clone to another folder and merge our changes by hand. Tell me I'm not the only one who does that from time to time, hoping it goes well so we don't have to quit our job and leave the country under the cover of night.

Part of the problem is that Git has a ridiculous number of rarely used commands, each with a long list of options. There are websites that will generate fake Git command documentation (search for "git man page generator" for an example), and it's hard to tell them apart from the real thing. Type the wrong Git command and you might lose your code changes, get stuck in vim (requiring a reboot to exit), upset your co-workers by pushing to the wrong branch, publish your passwords to GitHub, or even end up with a detached head (a truly terrifying prospect).

And, let's be honest, another part of the problem is that no one wants to look stupid. Everyone is expected to be a Git expert now, but most developers will admit (under conditions of strict anonymity) that they're not. So it can be a little embarrassing to ask for help.

You're in luck this book is here to help!

I've had the honor of knowing Jesse for at least a decade. Maybe longer both of our memories get fuzzy past the decade range. We've been co-workers, co-presenters, co-podcasters, co-authors, and also great friends. We both turn to each other for advice. Like many in the community, I've come to trust Jesse to break down complicated concepts to the essentials, and explain them in a way that just makes sense and, quite often, surprise us by making the whole process a lot of fun.

Jesse has outdone himself with this book. It's well designed and expertly written. When he told me that he was writing a book on Git, I honestly thought, "Good luck with that" because there's just so much to cover, but he's done an amazing job of figuring out the truly important concepts, focusing on them, and just nailing the explanations.

He's kept things "as simple as possible, but no simpler" as the quote (often attributed to Einstein) goes. There are some places where you need to know some Git internals to understand what you're doing, and Jesse explains those well, but he doesn't waste your attention with trivia.

A few of my favorite sections of the book:

The chapters on rebasing, amending, cherry-picking, and interactive rebasing really helped me more deeply understand what those commands are doing. I had some "cargo cult" commands that mostly seemed to work for me, but I couldn't have explained what they were actually doing. Jesse's diagrams and examples made a lot of lightbulbs go on for me there.

Some of the final chapters covering aliases, log, stash, and bisect gave me a lot of tips to work more effectively.

The Fixing Mistakes chapter is an amazing list of hands-on steps to get yourself out of common Git emergencies, and Jesse explains what the commands are doing. I absolutely see myself diving for this chapter the next time Git threatens to detach my head.

And finally, the challenges at the end of each chapter are an amazing resource. After learning the content in a chapter, these challenges (with detailed answers to follow) give you some fun puzzles to test your knowledge. I plan to revisit the challenges periodically to test my retention and read up on the solutions to fill in the spots I've forgotten.

Congratulations to you on picking a great book to take your Git knowledge to the next level, and to Jesse for proving me wrong and writing an amazing book about Git.

Jon Galloway

Senior Program Manager on the .NET Community Team

Jesse Liberty is a Principal Software Engineer at StoryBoardThat. He is the author of two dozen programming books and a not-yet-published novel, as well as over two dozen training videos for Pluralsight, Packt, and Udemy.

Jesse is an international speaker and blogger ( jesseliberty.com ) and he is the host of the popular Yet Another Podcast, which you can access through his web site: jesseliberty.com/podcast .

He has been programming for 30 years (starting in 8086 Assembly and C!) and in C# since 2001. He is currently focused on .NET 5/6, C# 9, and related technology (Git, Azure DevOps, etc.).

When he is not programming just kidding. He's always programming.

There are too many people to thank, but let's begin with the folks at Packt. Others, in no particular order, include: Namrata Katare, the people at StoryBoardThat, Mads Torgersen, Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Bill Wagner, Jared Parsons, Brent Laster, Jon Galloway, John Papa, Ward Bell, Adam Summers, Seth Weiss, Stacey Liberty, Skip Gilbrech, Dan Hurwitz, the folks in the Microsoft MVP program, the Albahari brothers, Douglas Crockford, Julie Lerman, Andrew Lock, Ken Henderson, and all the others I've forgotten.

Wilson Mar has been trying to figure out Git and GitHub since 2010. In 2020 he helped to migrate 3,000 developers and their repositories to GitHub.com . He collects PROTIPs at his blog, https://wilsonmar.github.io .

Johannes Schindelin has been involved in the Git project since 2005. He invented the interactive rebase and is the maintainer of Git for Windows.