Pro Git - CC licensed book on Git by Scott Chacon

by laktek on 7/27/2009, 3:39 PM with 25 comments
  • by Periodic on 7/27/2009, 6:29 PM

    Publishers, please, please allow us to buy electronic versions of your books. Just make it reasonably cheap ($5-10 instead of the full $50?) and in multiple formats (PDF and HTML are my favorites), and I will gladly buy them. I have a lot of trouble paying $50 just for a paper version of a book. Is there a chance this could be profitable?

    The thing I love most about free books is not that they are free, but that they are generally available in electronic formats that I can then use on my many devices. I can read them on my laptop without having to carry around twice the weight, have them for reference on my desktops without having tons of shelf space and copies for work and home, and have them on my iPod Touch for reading in bed or on the train.

    It's particularly an issue with large technical books, as they tend to be big and heavy and won't fit in my bike bag the way an iPod does.

  • by jsonscripter on 7/27/2009, 5:45 PM

    I just wanted to say I love how this post hardly has any comments because we're all busy reading the book.

  • by cschep on 7/27/2009, 6:00 PM

    I adore free books. One of the things that pushed me more towards the Python universe, instead of the Ruby universe, was that the quality of the free literature available for the language, and it's major web framework Django. (I know there are other great frameworks for both sides!)

    This will be a great way to (finally) learn more about Git.

  • by hachiya on 7/27/2009, 11:23 PM

    This is a great contribution to the hacker community. I've been using git for about 1 1/2 years, but I can't wait to read this book and learn more.

    If you go to the github URL, this is also a great way to see how one can use a markup language like Markdown to write an entire book in the text editor of your choice, e.g. Vim.

    Someone from reddit converted the book to PDF and made it available here:

    redraftable.com/temp/progit.pdf

  • by duairc on 7/28/2009, 4:06 PM

    To anybody looking for a PDF version: I've written a script that converts the Markdown version on github into a PDF via LaTeX: http://github.com/duairc/progit/master/latex

    I don't have the PDF on Github because it's so big, but you can get it here: http://netsoc.tcd.ie/~duairc/progit.en.pdf

    Its output is mostly fine, but there are a couple of very long lines in verbatim environments that go off the margin. I'm working on a fix for this, but it's not too serious a problem really.

  • by ivank on 7/27/2009, 11:58 PM

    The letter spacing (-0.03em) is awful with ClearType, so I fixed it with Stylish:

        @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
    @-moz-document domain("progit.org") {
    * { letter-spacing: 0 !important }
    }

  • by jli on 7/27/2009, 6:29 PM

    is there a pdf or portable format, I like to read my digital books when I don't have an internet connection.

  • by Adaptive on 7/28/2009, 4:25 PM

    One of the nicest online book companion sites I've seen. O'Reilly's book related sites, as much as I love O'Reilly books, look crufty in comparison.

  • by utnick on 7/27/2009, 4:04 PM

    wow, i'm surprised apress let him do this

    cool