24 January 2014

Ravishankar Somasundaram's Git - Version Control for Everyone - Provisional Review

Packt Publishing recently posted on G+ asking if anyone would be interested in reviewing one of their new books "GIT - Version Control For Everyone".



I agreed as Blender recently switched to using the GIT version control system and I thought some of the more technically inclined Blenderheads would be interested in a review.

This book is currently priced at £11.99 (Jan 24th 2014)

This is only a partial review as the people at Packt needed it posted fairly quickly and since I am not the fastest reader in the world, I said I would do a partial review of the chapters I was able to read.

I have so far managed to read through chapters 1 to 3.  It's not a massive book, the ebook consists of about 180 pages (trust me GIT huge so getting it down to 180 pages it an impressive feat).  So far it appears to be well written and easy to follow along with.  It takes the approach of guiding you through a series of tasks, teaching you GIT through a learn by doing approach and using common analogies to make sense of some of the more difficult concepts involved with GIT.

Because this books is aimed at the GIT beginner is uses lots of pictures, which are very easy to see and interpret.

From the chapters I have read it goes though all the basic steps of obtaining, installing and configuring GIT on the most common platforms available (specially Windows, Mac, Linux).  It describes the many different types of version control systems and their relative strengths and weaknesses when compared with GIT.  So it doesn't just explain how to do specific things in GIT but also the reasons why things are carried out the way they are.

So far what I have read has been very well written and even though this books seems specifically aimed at the GIT beginning, I think the person that has a little bit of exposure to GIT would also benefit from reading this book.

If you are not a person that likes to use Graphical User Interfaces for your GIT tasks the Command Line Interface versions are also covers.  So it appears that both type of user are supported.

By the last part of chapter 3, the basics of adding, removing and controlling files with GIT in a project had been covered and it to me at least seemed well explained and easy to grasp (and I am by no means a GIT expert).

When I have read the entire book I will do a full review.

See the links below for books website:

http://www.packtpub.com/git-version-control-for-everyone/book
http://goo.gl/mnN6kH