Mastering Advanced Git by Matthew McCullough and Tim Berglund; O’Reilly Media

  Mastering Advanced Git video presented by Matthew McCullough and Tim Berglund is a must watch for anyone that is working or looking to work with Git.  Matthew and Tim present a lot of great information on how to take advantage of some advanced topics in Git in a very short amount of time.  In this 4 hour collection of videos they cover important topics like Rerere, Pull Options, Push Options, Rebase, and more.  These guys have a lot of experience in Git and present the information in a fun way by presenting questions and the answers to the questions.  I was surprised at how much information that they were able to pack in and still have time to provide examples, demos, and answer questions from the live audience.  If you are looking at using or currently using Git, this collection of videos is a must watch even though it is on the more advanced side.  I am a beginner to using Git, but have been using different source control systems over the years and was able to follow along.  There was some moments that I need to research more about Git to fully understand what was going on, but for the most part Matthew and Tim provided back ground to the basic topics covered in their other video collection on Git.  I would consider getting their other video collection on Mastering Git and I know that I would learn even more based on how well they presented the information in this collection.

If you haven’t looked at Git for your source control solution, I would recommend looking into it.  It has so many great advantages of being able to share code and merge code without having to be connected to the master repository.  I have personally ran into issues where we had a team of developers working on site to get a solution to the customer and it was the biggest pain to all have to connect to the corporate network and each upload and download changes to the project’s code.  Then we had to designate a single person to get the final download in order to install the final product.  The time that was wasted merging, managing conflicts, etc was just too much.  If we had Git and were able to share the changes using the techniques that Matthew and Tim presented in this collection of videos we would have save a great deal of time.

One of the topics that I really enjoyed was the talk around setting up the options for is rebasing in Git.  At the beginning of this discussion I really didn’t understand why this is such a great feature.  Then after they explain what is going on within Git and why it such a great thing to do, the light bulb turned on and I was able to understand why this is so great.  The way that Matthew and Tim present the information in these videos, they do such a great job to explain everything very well so you no longer feel like there is some type of magic going on in the back ground.

If you don’t have any experience with Git, then I would recommend looking into their first collection on Mastering Git (something that I am looking at doing myself) and then watching Mastering Advanced Git. Even though I have been working with Git for awhile, I am looking at getting their first collection just based off how well they presented the information in the Mastering Advanced Git collection.  Well done gentelmen and continue the great job of providing inspirational videos.