Sixteen years, two editions, dozens of translations — and a third edition on the way.
Linus Torvalds writes Git to manage Linux kernel development after the kernel community loses access to BitKeeper. Within a few years it becomes the dominant version control system in open source — and a tool badly in need of a good book.
Scott Chacon writes Pro Git, published by Apress in August 2009. Unusually for a print book, the full text is released as open source under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, and it becomes the official book of the Git project, hosted at git-scm.com.
Because the source is open, readers fix errata, contribute improvements, and translate the book. Volunteer translations appear in dozens of languages, making Pro Git one of the most widely translated technical books ever published.
Scott Chacon and Ben Straub rewrite the book for the modern Git era: new chapters on GitHub and distributed workflows, refreshed tooling coverage, and a move from Markdown to AsciiDoc sources. Published by Apress in November 2014, with the source in the progit/progit2 repository.
For over a decade the second edition is continuously maintained on GitHub — hundreds of contributors keep commands, screenshots, and behavior notes current as Git evolves through its 2.x series. Translation teams maintain parallel repositories for their languages.
Git 3.0 changes defaults the book has taught since the beginning: main as the default branch, SHA-256 object hashes, reftable ref storage, and a Rust build toolchain. The third edition — this repository — revises the book to match, once again in the open.
The revision work is inventoried chapter by chapter inREVISION_PLAN.md, and progress is posted on the blog.