For about the last 8 months, I’ve been working on a side project. In November, Apress contacted me about writing a book about Git and I thought it would be a good idea. I may have slightly underestimated the amount of work that it would take, but a few days ago I put the content of the book online under a Creative Commons noncommercial 3.0 license. The book is titled “Pro Git” and you can read it or reference it online at http://progit.org.

The actual printed version will be shipping in another few weeks, but as Apress was kind enough to allow me to publish it under the CC license, you can take a look now. I hope it’s helpful to you in learning or teaching Git.

The full markdown content for the book, as well as all the images and the .graffle file I used to generate them is on GitHub at progit/progit. If you’re interested in providing a translation under the CC license, please fork the project, copy the ‘en’ folder to the language code of your choice and start translating – I’ll put them online as they are done. Chinese, Portuguese and Ukrainian translations have already been started. Man I love GitHub.

I also encourage you to buy a copy if you use the online resource a lot. Though as a disclaimer I do get royalties when you do, I really do want this to be a commercial success so that more publishing companies and authors will release technical books under open licenses – it benefits the entire community and I’m really glad Apress let me do it.

Oh yeah, the other cool thing is that the Pro Git website is a GitHub Pages site being generated with Jekyll.

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