Git – Peepcode Screencast Review
The other screencast i finally got around to watch was the Git - PeepCode Screencast. It's about 61 minutes long and can be purchased here. This is my review.
LIKES:
The screencast was a pretty high level, albeit detailed, overview of the git version control system and was at the level I needed (beginner). The flow from part 1 to part 8 was very seamless and covered about everything a regular user would need to know to use Git at work. Some features were covered that I were new to me (from an SVN perspective), including stashing files and applying hunks instead of the whole patch.
GRIPES:
Like the clojure screencast, things moved around pretty fast (I'm starting to get accustomed to it, though). I didn't quite get the advantage of rebasing before a merge (this and this provide some good rationale). I know this wasn't a comparison screencast between VCSs (notably, SVN), but I was left wondering where the advantages were when moving from SVN to Git. This led me to some searching with links in the resources section that helped. I was mostly confused on the distributed workflow part (part 8 ) because he was going through pretty arbitrary changes to branches and I had a hard time mapping those activities to a work environment. When he was switching between authors/committers, that made a bunch more sense to me. One last thing, the speaker was about 2-3 seconds behind the commands going to the CLI which made understanding difficult especially when a 'clear' was issued and a concept was being wrapped up.
TAKEAWAYS:
git add -i ; for interactive staging, afterwards don't do 'git commit -a'
partial commit of files w/ patching
git log --stat, --shortstat, --pretty=full for logging statistics
In general, git log is extremely full featured (searching)
git blame file to see line numbers and who modified it and when
git instaweb --httpd=webrick ; to browse the repo
git stash to put away files that aren't ready to be committed in order to switch branches
run git add on a file after you have cleared out the merge conflicts
git reset --hard will revert changes back to the latest good version of the branch
CONCLUSION:
This screencast was similar to the Clojure one in that as a developer would go through software development lifecycle, various features were touched on in order (e.g. checking out a repo, adding files, committing, checking status, etc). I enjoyed this screencast less than the Clojure one but still found it valuable from a beginner's perspective. Still, at $12, this screencast provides good value for those that want to get an easy jump start on Git.
RESOURCES:
Some links I used to supplement my understanding with the PeepCode Screencast
Git - SVN Crash Course
Git Tutorial
GitSvn Comparison
