Archive for september, 2011

Pragmatic version control using Git

tirsdag, september 20th, 2011

Written by Travis Swicegood published by The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2008, ISBN-13: 978-1-934356-15-9

At 184 pages this is a short book on Git, but it does cover the bare necessities and then some. Apart form 3 appendices the information is added in 11 chapters:

  1. Version control the Git way
  2. Setting up Git
  3. Creating your first project
  4. Adding and committing: Git basics
  5. Understanding and using branches
  6. Working with Git’s history
  7. Working with remote repositories
  8. Organizing your repository
  9. Beyond the basics
  10. Migrating to Git
  11. Running a Git server with Gitosis

While Git is more complex than the book can explain – and it doesn’t try to explain everything, it is pragmatic after all – I would say it covers the Pareto 80% of the standard user’s needs.

Following the Pragmatic tenor the book does the job of demystifying Git without attacking Subversion or CVS – or any of the other distributed version control systems. Chapter 10 handles the issue of migrating from SVN or CVS (via SVN) to Git.

As a side note to this, I would add that I think filesystems are stupid in the sense that they ought to have changed to transaction based systems at the time disk space was sufficient for this kind of storage, and that the ‘save’ button in every application ought to simply do something akin to a Git commit. IMHO the snapshot way we currently use is simply stupid.

While there are some nifty tricks you can do with Git with regards to the history I think it should be mentioned that these tricks are better left only for your personal branches and not for a shared commit. That is, it is okay to modify the order and squashing branches before you push or allow others to pull.

It’s kind of funny that the single biggest benefit of using Git – as I see it – is the personal revision control, and that isn’t mentioned in greater terms, though Travis does mention the benefit when he was working with a Subversion repo – see the box “Being the Git: Using Git in a Subversion Company” on page 141.

I would have liked to have seen some recommended workflows for different setups as well as some developer discipline guides, i.e. branch before you do anything new, have a working solution you’d like to be able to return to? Commit! Even after a working unit test.

The book is a fast and okay-to-good read.

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Building and testing with Gradle

onsdag, september 7th, 2011

Written by Tim Berglund and Matthew McCullogh published by O’Reilly, ISBN: 9781449304638

The only book out there on Gradle, and it is relatively new published July 2011. At 110 pages it is rather short, and doesn’t cover everything about Gradle – it’s not a ‘Complete guide to Gradle’, but the 6 chapters cover the basics in the obvious ways:

  1. Hello, Gradle!
  2. Gradle Tasks
  3. Ant and Gradle
  4. Maven and Gradle
  5. Testing with Gradle
  6. Multiproject Builds

The book does provide pointers for migrating from e.g. Maven to Gradle. As I’m not intimately familiar with neither Maven nor Gradle, I can’t really say if it is sufficient to jump from Ant directly into Gradle, or if a quick pit-stop in the Maven (3?) camp is beneficial.

There are a few kind of typos in the book, e.g. Example 1-5 the src directory seems to be a subdirectory of the build.gradle file, this is fixed in Example 1-6 though.

There’s also a minor issue with the doFirst() method – I’d suggest saying that this would prepend or prefix the closure to the existing block as opposed to saying appending to the beginning.

The book is more concise and better organized than the Gradle user guide which seems to do a halfbaked description, then referring to a later chapter.

Running some modified examples from the book – not from the github repository – I experienced a rather detrimental blow up when applying the plugins for Scala and Groovy. The compiler dependencies need to be added to the build file.

Being the only book on the subject it’s sad that it’s not a Complete Guide, but it does fulfill what the title promises, it’s just not enough. An okay read though.

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