Part I: Acceleration

The first part of this book is loosely structured around a programming narrative. The code examples all follow an example code base, from creation of the first file, to completion of the first feature.

In the beginning, you’ll see detailed explanations of changes to the code. As the chapters progress, I’ll skip some details. The purpose of the code examples is to give you a context for the various practices and techniques being introduced.

If I’ve skipped a detail that you’d like to know more about, you can consult the Git repository that accompanies the book. Each code listing is tagged with the commit ID that identifies the source.

The history of the commits that belong to this part is quite polished. If you read through that part of the Git history, it’ll look as though I barely made any mistakes. That’s not the case.

To err is human, and I make as many mistakes as you. One of the wonderful features of Git, however, is that you can rewrite history. I’ve been rebasing that part of the repository multiple times to make it as polished as I wanted it.

I didn’t do that to cover my mistakes. I did it because I felt that for those readers who’d like to learn from the repository, it’d be more educational if I removed the noise of my mistakes.

The example code forms a narrative from which to introduce the practices that I describe. In this part of the book, you’ll see the code accelerate from zero to a deployed feature. But even if you aren’t working with green-field development, you should be able to use the techniques to increase your efficiency.