Best newbie / advanced / expert reference texts for Git?

Hi there,

What are the best texts for the following three levels of knowledge:

1. Newbie: someone who used a simple, centralized SCM (such as SVN)
but never touched Git.
2. Intermediate: someone who uses Git's simpler features, and can do
simple branching/merging, but would like to fully understand the
underlying concepts such as the DAG, and master all common user-level
operations such as branching, merging, and rebasing.
3. Advanced: someone who knows all the above, but would like to know
everything there is to know about Git.

The target audience in my particular case is smart, with strong CS background, especially those in the two latter categories.

Being available online is a plus, but will not disqualify a good offline reference.

Thanks, D

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 6:02 AM, Dun Peal <dunpealer@gmail.com> wrote:

Check out http://progit.org/. I am not affiliated with the author(s) or the web site. I just stumbled across it a couple of weeks ago when I went to set up a git server for our group. It seems to answer every question I've ever had about git, and then some.

--wpd

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 11:18 AM, Patrick Doyle <wpdster@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks; sounds like it should serve well for the Advanced and possibly Intermediate categories. Still need a good text for the Newbie class.

P.S. I glanced at it briefly and it seemed a bit out of date, but perhaps my inspection was too cursory.

D

On Fri, 19 Nov 2010 11:38:26 +0000 Dun Peal <dunpealer@gmail.com> wrote:

http://git-scm.com/course/svn.html http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1042280/a-subversion-users-guide-to-git and http://www.google.com/search?q=git+for+svn+users in general.

Also there's a very good DVCS introductory writing for real newbies which deals with concepts rather than commands -- http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.html

Dun Peal <dunpealer@gmail.com> writes:

"Pro Git" out of date. Oh really? It is kept quite up to date (for example adding information about "gitolite" and "smart" HTTP transport), see https://github.com/progit/progit

As to other documentation, see
  https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitDocumentation

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

Wow, that's pretty cool. Any idea how often the online version at http://progit.org is synced with the github version?

D

Hey,

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 3:47 PM, Dun Peal <dunpealer@gmail.com> wrote:

I merge it in and push changes every month or so now. It was more often, but the errata and translations are coming in less frequently. I have a number of pull requests pending, mostly for formatting fixes and translation additions. I'll probably do another merge/push around Thanksgiving.

Scott

Hey,

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 11:38 AM, Dun Peal <dunpealer@gmail.com> wrote:

For newbies as a sort of shorter tutorial/reference I also have http://gitref.org These and other resources are listed out in http://git-scm.com/documentation

It is up to date as of 1.6.x - I have pulled in updates in some parts and added blog posts on newer features and whatnot, but the main text even should not really be noticeably out of date. At some point I will roll the blog post updates back into the main text.

Do you have any examples?

Scott

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 3:54 PM, Scott Chacon <schacon@gmail.com> wrote:

Cool, looks like what I need for the Newbie class.

Yeah there are definitely a lot of resources listed there; so many, that one can't readily decide which to use and for what purpose ;-)

I just glanced through a description of checking out branches and didn't see the feature that creates a remote-tracking branch foo when you `git checkout foo`, and foo isn't a local branch but does exist on the remote.

Very cool of you to open your text up like that. I'll get a bunch of copies of ProGit ordered as soon as I can.

D

Hey,

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Dun Peal <dunpealer@gmail.com> wrote:

Hm, perhaps I should simplify the page a bit then.

Well, that will never be included - I find it really confusing and try to discourage people from using it in favor of 'git checkout -b foo origin/foo' because i feel it's much more consistent. I would like to make the tracking branch section a bit better, but that's not really an 'out of date' thing.

Thanks again, Scott

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 6:02 PM, Dun Peal <dunpealer@gmail.com> wrote:

It's obvious: the source code and its history, then old timers (ok no more texts) who can tell you its history, original design...