TravisSwicegood.com

If you follow my tweets, you'll have seen that I'm writing Pragmatic Version Control Using Git. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited. Of all of the publishers to write for, the accidental ones have always been high on my list since the quality of their books is so universally high.

I've been wanting to write a book for awhile now, I just could never figure out what on. Some time last year I decided that I wouldn't push it until some topic felt right. This past winter as I learned Git it started to feel right. Before I committed to a book, I decided to write an article (which should appear in over the summer in php|architect). When I finished the article I realized I had barely scratched the surface and that it would take a full book to do the topic justice. And now a few weeks after my initial pitch to the Pragmatic Programmers, I'm set to start.

The market for this book is wide open right now. There is nothing available in print form on Git so the newbie is left to manpages and random blog posts that Google turns up. You can find out how to do just about anything, and in the time-honored Perl tradition, you can find out 10 different ways to do most things. For someone just interested in evaluating it, though, there isn't much out there. Find answers to the questions "what good is it?" (in a non fanboy way) and "how do I use it every day?" requires some digging. By the time I get through with this book, I plan on having both of those questions, and a few more answered.

Since this is my first book, I'm sure there'll be blog posts aplenty about the process and such. Right now I'm raring to go, using most of my free time to write. We'll see if I still feel that way after the third rewrite of an intro paragraph to some odd ball chapter. :-) If you're interested in following this, I'll be tagging posts with git book (atom feed of git book posts).

Finally, if you're feeling generous with your links, I'd love the help getting the phrase "git book" to the top of Google. Only one post tagged and I'm already on the front page, but it never hurts to have a few inbound links too ;-)