A conversation on identica this morning made me realize that I tend to see a lot of questions on Twitter and other microblogging sites about where to get good introductions to the Git version control system. I’ve been researching and using Git for about 6 months now and have done a ton of work collecting information along the way. As more and more people find out about git, there are a lot of questions being asked that I have asked as I was learning the software, so I thought I would write a quick post to aggregate all of the information I’ve found to get it all in one place. Hopefully, this page helps those who want to learn Git but have a hard time finding information. All of the materials in this post have been invaluable to me in learning this software.
Reading
- First, there are my del.icio.us bookmarks. Every time I find something new, I bookmark and tag it here. There’s a lot of great links written by others on using Git in this list.
- The book Pragmatic Version Control Using Git by Travis Swicegood is excellent for those just starting out. As with all Pragmatic books, the content is, well, pragmatic – and gets you started quickly.
- Scott Chacon has some excellent materials as well. His PDF book Git Internals is excellent and his Git Casts are what got me actually productive using Git in a very short time frame. I highly recommend these screencasts as a way to start out. As an aside, Scott recently took a job at GitHub. His blog is also an excellent resource on Git.
Hosting
- For hosting, I use GitHub. For public repositories, hosting is free. You get about 10MB of space to play with. A free GitHub account is perfect for playing with cloning and getting familiar with the distributed nature of Git. For private repositories, you can get an account for as little as $7 a month. Pricing can be found on the GibHub Pricing and Signup page. I have a paid hosting plan and I can tell you first hand, its worth every cent.
- I’m not familiar with any other hosting site. GitHub has met my needs thus far and I haven’t looked at anything else.
Environments
While Git does run on Windows using Cygwin or the msysgit installation, it was written on Unix and runs best on Unix based systems. MSysGit does not include the git svn tool, so if you are working with Subversion, you might want to opt for the cygwin version or a virtual machine. Both Windows versions run (understandably) slower on Windows. If you are starting out there, I’m sure you will see a big speed improvement over Subversion. I’m spoiled and started using it on Unix based systems (Linux / Mac OSX), so I notice the speed difference.
Hopefully, this gives you a good starting point on information related to the Git software and saves you the time looking for information that I had to spend looking around.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Have you checked out Bzr before? I don’t advocate Bzr or Git, but I’m just curious to know why you chose Git over Bzr.
I use Bzr myself, because it was easier to get my head around, and is dead simple to host — no special server needed. Again, I don’t know if Git does that.
To be honest with you, I chose git because there was a lot of talk about it, a lot of large projects moving to it, and the speed of operations once I found it. I was also not a big fan of using a source control system written in a scripting language. I wanted it to be something native and optimized.
I do have it on my list to check out the others at some point for curiosity sake.
Hah! Couldn’t find my Git links so I googled Git resources and you came up on the first page!
I knew there was a reason I put all this stuff up here!