First, I would like to thank the entire Git development community for giving us such a great tool. I dislike working in C and so have contributed little actual code to the Git project, opting instead to try to teach, document, and evangelize it, which I tend to be a lot better at. However, without the guys that wrote and maintain Git, I would still be living in the sad and hopeless version-controlled world that is Subversion.

I would also very much like to thank Shawn Pearce, who, aside from being one of the more prolific developers on the Git project, is also the technical editor for this book. Shawn has saved me from making countless horrible technical mistakes in this book and has done so on numerous other occasions as well. I always enjoy working with him; I tend to give my best guess at something, and then he teaches me what the right answer is. I have learned a ton from him, which I often get to teach to hundreds of others (who then give me credit).

I want to thank my good friend Nick Hengeveld, who has contributed a lot of work to Git and, more important for me, introduced me to the tool and taught me how to use it back in the pre-1.0 days. There is probably no way I would be doing all this if he had not brought Git to my attention and introduced it to the environment in which we both worked.

Further thanks go to Chris Wanstrath, Tom Preston-Werner, and PJ Hyett for inviting me to join them in working on GitHub very early on, allowing me to spend basically all my time thinking about and working on Git-related projects. It's difficult to imagine a better group of people to work with or a better job to have.

Last, I want to thank my wife, Jessica, who kept me continually working at this. Writing a book of this scope is a heck of a process, and when I stalled out from time to time, she made sure I got back on track. Thanks, Magoo.