Foreword

I first heard of Git probably nine years ago, around the end of 2005, right around when v1.0 was being tagged. Reading through my friend Mike’s book, it amazes me just how much has changed in what I’m only now realizing has been nearly a decade of history.

At the time I was introduced to Git, it was still very much more of a collection of tools for content management and less a version control system. It was installed as hundreds of commands such as git-update-index instead of the single git command we now call. In fact, in my first exposure to it, I used it at work as a transport mechanism for media content, instead using Perforce to version-control the code we wrote around Git.

It fascinated me how clean and simple the data model was and how easy it was to manipulate to do anything you wanted, not simply what was prescribed and intended. Equally fascinating was how difficult it was to learn. It took my friend weeks to drill into me how this thing worked, but after that I was totally hooked and have spent most of the decade since helping people use it and understand it.