Ry's Git Tutorial Review

picture of cover page

By Christopher Williams

Ry’s Git Tutorial is a short, cheap book that was self published by an unknown author, so how good is it at being a Git tutorial? It turns out, it works incredibly well!

Ry’s Git Tutorial goes through the basics of Git, a version control system that is widely used in both open source and commercial development. The general overview of the skills that are taught are initializing a git repository for both remote and offline use, committing snapshots, searching and manipulating the history, branching, patching, merging, rebasing and low level plumbing (basically how Git works behind the scenes).

picture of an example of git

Every command is explained thoroughly, both through clear explanations and exercises that guides you through the process of using each command. The practice is the most biggest part of the book rather than just giving a short overview of each command. The steps are easy to follow as you create a small website for colors while using Git. If, for whatever reason you loss the files or want to skip parts, there are checkpoints that can be downloaded from Github or the website so you can resume the exercises from there. Finally at the end of each chapter, a short summery and a short reference page of the commands used in that section helps piece everything together at the end.

picture of an example in the book

Ry’s Git Tutorial is a wonderful, little book that very effectively teaches Git. The exercises shows when, how and why to use any command. By using each command repeatably it also helps you remember the infomation for later, which is always a problem when learning a new skill. The short length of the book makes it easy to review later on and helps staves off boredom that come from any skill book that overstays its welcome.

Like with any work, it does have some issues but most of them are minor and do not take much away from its value. The HTML and CSS in the exercises are not hard but take a long time to do, which takes time away from learning Git. It is also a hard finding the commands again due to there not being a central reference page that has all of the commands. One issue that affects only the Kindle version of the book is that the checkpoints that the author created on Github are no longer there though other people have recreated them and it will be linked at the bottom of the page.

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