Two Git Books

This post is about two Git books I recently read. Git is a complicated tool which is not easy to figure out simply by Google searching.

I start with the O’Reilly book Version Control with Git 2nd ed by Jon Loeliger and Matthew McCullough. The book is good, and examples in chapters 5 and 6 are especially nice. However, the book is not an easy read. I read the first 12 chapters carefully and skim the rest chapters.

Then I read the more popular book Pro Git written by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub. Scott Chacon is one of the founders of github. The book is freely available on official git website git-scm.com. This book is excellent. I especially like the workflow sections in chapter 5 because those materials are not easy to find online. I read the first 6 chapters twice and skim the rest book. This book is also more practical for engineers, and you can use the book as a reference for daily projects. If you only have time for one book, this is the one to get.

One benefit I get from reading the two books is that I can easily understand the Source Control panel in Visual Studio Code. It is very neat VS Code has version control system built in.