Preface by Scott Chacon
Welcome to the second edition of Pro Git. The first edition was published over
four years ago now. Since then a lot has changed and yet many important
things have not. While most of the core commands and concepts are still valid
today as the Git core team is pretty fantastic at keeping things backward com-
patible, there have been some significant additions and changes in the commu-
nity surrounding Git. The second edition of this book is meant to address those
changes and update the book so it can be more helpful to the new user.
When I wrote the first edition, Git was still a relatively diicult to use and
barely adopted tool for the harder core hacker. It was starting to gain steam in
certain communities, but had not reached anywhere near the ubiquity it has to-
day. Since then, nearly every open source community has adopted it. Git has
made incredible progress on Windows, in the explosion of graphical user inter-
faces to it for all platforms, in IDE support and in business use. The Pro Git of
four years ago knows about none of that. One of the main aims of this new edi-
tion is to touch on all of those new frontiers in the Git community.
The Open Source community using Git has also exploded. When I originally
sat down to write the book nearly five years ago (it took me a while to get the
first version out), I had just started working at a very little known company de-
veloping a Git hosting website called GitHub. At the time of publishing there
were maybe a few thousand people using the site and just four of us working on
it. As I write this introduction, GitHub is announcing our 10 millionth hosted
project, with nearly 5 million registered developer accounts and over 230 em-
ployees. Love it or hate it, GitHub has heavily changed large swaths of the Open
Source community in a way that was barely conceivable when I sat down to
write the first edition.
I wrote a small section in the original version of Pro Git about GitHub as an
example of hosted Git which I was never very comfortable with. I didn’t much
like that I was writing what I felt was essentially a community resource and also
talking about my company in it. While I still don’t love that conflict of interests,
the importance of GitHub in the Git community is unavoidable. Instead of an
example of Git hosting, I have decided to turn that part of the book into more
deeply describing what GitHub is and how to eectively use it. If you are going
to learn how to use Git then knowing how to use GitHub will help you take part
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