A new table of contents · Pro Git Blog

The third edition has a new shape. The restructure just landed in the repository: chapters renumbered and retitled, two chapters that didn’t exist before, and several that won’t be coming back. Let’s walk through it.

Here’s the new table of contents:

Getting Started
Git Basics
Git Branching
Distributed Git
Git Toolkit
Customizing Git
Git and Agents
Git Servers
Git at Scale
Git Internals

…plus a single appendix, the Git command reference.

What’s new

Two chapters are brand new.

Git at Scale (Chapter 9) is about what happens when your repository stops being small: shallow and partial clones, sparse checkout, Scalar, large files, and monorepo practice. The second edition predates every one of those features, so this chapter starts from a blank page. It sits second-to-last on purpose — it leans on the internals that Chapter 10 explains.

Git and Agents (Chapter 7) is about using Git when some of your contributors are AI coding agents: workflows like branch-per-agent and worktree-per-agent, the tools and libraries agents drive Git with, and how to guide machine contributors in a repository you maintain.

There are smaller additions too:

Git Branching finally gets a Worktrees section. git worktree has been in Git since 2.5, and the book has never mentioned it.
Distributed Git gains a forge-neutral Pull Requests and Forges section — the fork-branch-PR loop, keeping a fork in sync, and what refs/pull/* actually is.
Ignoring files grows from a passing subsection into a full section of Customizing Git.

What’s gone

The GitHub chapter is retired. It was the fastest-aging part of the book — most of its screenshots stopped matching reality years ago — and its durable material (pull requests, forks, notifications) is exactly what the new forge-neutral section in Distributed Git now covers. Account setup, organization management, and the API tour don’t make the cut.

Git and Other Systems is retired as well. The Subversion, Mercurial, and Perforce bridges mattered when teams were migrating to Git; that era is behind us, and the pages can go to material you’ll actually use.

Two of the three appendices go with them: the editor-and-GUI survey, and the embedding appendix — though the library survey from the latter resurfaces inside Git and Agents, updated with gitoxide and per-library SHA-256 notes.

Two chapters change names along the way. Git Tools is now Git Toolkit, and Git on the Server is now Git Servers — and it moves toward the back of the book, since most readers meet a hosted forge long before they run a server of their own.

One thing to be clear about: what landed is the structure, not the writing. The new chapters and sections are outline placeholders — notes on what each one will cover — and the prose will be written by the book’s human authors, as all of it is. The full section-by-section punch list is OUTLINE.md, and you can watch the boxes get ticked on the progress page.

If you think the new shape is missing something, now is the time to say so — the outline is much easier to change than a finished chapter. Open an issue at github.com/progit/progit3 and make the case.