Re: Presentation Ideas

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 17, 2009, 18:41 UTC
Message-ID: <20090417184109.GA30489@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <450196A1AAAE4B42A00A8B27A59278E70AB285C4@EXCHANGE.trad.tradestation.com>

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 11:29:36AM -0400, John Dlugosz wrote:

> I'm going to be giving a presentation on git to other development teams.
> Is there any good material around I can borrow from or use as
> inspiration?

There seem to be two popular ways to present git, and which you prefer to see seems to be a matter of personal learning style. They are:

  1. top-down; i.e., explaining commands in terms of workflow and
     accomplishing user-oriented tasks, and trying to minimize details
     unnecessary to the task at hand

  2. bottom-up; i.e., explaining the data structures of git first, upon
     which you can explain the behavior of commands, out of which you
     can see how to piece together tasks.

I prefer (2) myself. It's a steeper learning curve, but I think it pays off when advanced topics in git just make sense (but then, I also think that normal users should understand sed and awk).

If you are interested in (2), I have often seen this page referenced:

  http://eagain.net/articles/git-for-computer-scientists/

I also did a presentation of git to some CS grad students that was very bottom-up. The slides are somewhat mediocre, but I would be happy to share them if you like.

I think I stole a few diagrams from Junio's OLS talk, which has some nice images (I especially like the symbolic view of the 3-way merge):

  http://members.cox.net/junkio/200607-ols.pdf

-Peff