Deciding on an audience is a very important step in writing any book. During the planning stages and the early writing my target audience was loosely defined. I wanted “every person who creates or manages electronic files” to read it. I included writers, artists, and (yes) programmers in this audience. Anyone who needs versioned files could stand to learn Git, I thought. In the end, this proved to be too broad.
Right now, my target audience are programmers who are beginning to learn Git. Ideally you have some programming experience, so the motivating examples won’t throw you off too much. The book is less about code and more about managing code.
My ideal target audience is also new to version control systems, but this is only an ideal. I know many of you will have some experience with other version control systems, especially if you have more experience. If you do, then try to keep an open mind about Git’s quirks.
My target audience should have some familiarity with typing commands into a command line. Everything we type will be carefully spelled out, however, since the book is written in tutorial fashion. That said, the book does make use of Git’s UIs (gitk
and git gui
).
Hopefully you see yourself in this description. I’m writing for you!