Git

Introduction to Git

I have been using the Git version control system for almost one and a half years and am thrilled every day. Even at my employer, switching from Subversion to Git will soon happen.

At home, everything is Git repositories on my hard drive, and I cannot imagine working without Git anymore. Git has improved a lot over the last year and a lot of additional software, documentation, and films have been released for Git.

I replace the now obsolete post of 2007 with a large list of helpful links to Git:

Official Website

• Git – Fast Version Control System

Tutorials and Documentations

• The Git Community Book – The community book, available online and as a PDF

Short Instructions

• tryGit – Learn Git interactive in the browser
• Git Immersion – Beautifully designed Guided Tour through the basics of Git
• git – the simple guide – Git in a nutshell (on a long page)
• Official Git Tutorial
• SVN Crash Course – A crash course for people who already know SVN
• Effectively Using Git With Subversion – A good introduction to how to use Subversion (SVN) with Git
• Git Ready – Short git tips for beginners, advanced, and professionals
• Sei (k)ein Blödmann und nimm Git: Einführung in Versionskontrolle mit Git – my German presentation about Git

Instructions with More Detail

• Intro to Distributed Version Control (Illustrated) – Detailed, illustrated explanation of distributive version control
• Git for Computer Scientists – A brief introduction to the technical details in Git
• Git User’s Manual – The Official User Guide
• Git Magic – An alternative book
• The GitHub Guides – GitHub tips and tutorials
• An Illustrated Guide to Git on Windows – Step-by-step guide for Windows users
• Vss2git – A Windows GUI That Exports an Existing Microsoft Visual Sourcesafe 6.0 (VSS) Repository to a New Git Repository.

References

• Reference Manual – Detailed reference of all commands
• Git Cheat Sheet – A useful cheat sheet

Videos and Screencasts

• Official Git Screencasts
• Google Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git – Linus Torvalds presents Git at Google
• Google Tech Talk: Git – Randal Schwartz introduces Git for an hour
• Git the basics – Bart Trojanowski introduces Git (2 parts)

Git Hosting

• GitHub
• Bitbucket

Software

MacOS

• Gity – Git-GUI with many features in the Snow Leopard style (now under Open Source!)
• GitX – Chic Git GUI for Mac OS X.
• ProjectPlus – TextMate plug-in, the Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, and SVN status flags supported
• Git TextMate bundle – TextMate bundle

Windows

• Git for Windows – A Windows Git GUI
• Git Extensions – A sleek Windows Git GUI, with 5 screencasts to use
• TortoiseGit – Git as a Windows Explorer shell extension
• SmartGit – Commercial solution for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux

Conclusion

There’s no reason now not switch to Git, and any ridiculous argument against Git can be casually refuted. Although there are a lot of subversion repositories, even this can be cloned without problems thanks to git-svn (which is installed with Git).

Subversion and Git (Mercurial, Bazaar, …) cannot be compared because their approach is different. With Git, you can work in the same way (central repository) as with Subversion. But you can work distributed and use the many fantastic possibilities of Git (local branches, offline work, nearly no server load, small file size, …).

If Subversion is used in your company, and it does not work to introduce Git (despite Git’s clear, business benefits), then use git-svn for a transitional period (people will not even know). Although not all options are available from Git, the work is at least easier.