Re: Git Community Book

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

"Scott Chacon" <schacon@gmail.com> writes:

> So I wanted to develop a really nice, easy to follow book for Git
> newcomers to learn git quickly and easily.  One of the issues I
> remember having when learning Git is that there is a lot of great
> material in the User Guide, Tutorial, Tutorial 2, Everyday Git, etc -
> but they're all huge long documents that are sometimes difficult to
> come back to and remember where you were, and I didn't know which one
> to start with or where to find what I was looking for, etc.

Interesting.  A few comments, before I get dragged into my day job fully.

[overall]

 - Some people mentioned that the necessity of reading through large
   volume of documentation can be reduced if they were divided by
   developer roles (similar to how Everyday does), e.g. people in
   individual contributor role does not have to learn integrator tools
   such as "am" in their first pass on the documentation.  Has the
   approach considered while developing this book?

 - The order of sections in "Working with Git" chapter somehow does not
   feel quite right, except that I'd agree that "Git on Windows" at the
   beginning is a very good idea (disclaimer. I do not use Windows
   myself). "StGIT" coming next was very understandable, but then
   "Capistrano"????  And no CVS section next to Subversion section?  Ruby
   before Perl or Python (I would have listed Perl, Python and then Ruby
   to avoid language wars.  That's the language age order, and it is even
   alphabetical)???

   Above "Capistrano" and "Ruby" comment shows the bias this TOC has (and
   my bias being different from the TOC's bias).  I'd imagine that
   Ruby-minded folks won't share the same reaction as I had.  What's the
   target audience of this book?  Git users in general, or primarily
   Ruby-minded subset?  If the latter, labeling this as "Community Book"
   may be misleading.

[http://book.git-scm.com/1_the_git_object_database.html]

 - The color of "blob" does not match the blob that is committed to eat
   trees at the top of your site ;-)

 - In a recent thread on the list, quite a lot of people seem to have
   found that teaching the low level details and plumbing first to the new
   people is detrimental.  Do you have response to that thread?