I'm in the middle of replacing Subversion with Git - more details on Git to come shortly, but here's a quick overview on installation.
The details on the Git website/book itself do a full installation. As I only need it on a server, then rather than the full UI additions, a simple installation from source is lighter ...
From the Git source repositories, grab the latest version -
https://code.google.com/p/git-core/downloads/list
and untar this using tar -xvf "downloaded file"
To install within a typical /usr/bin location, first make then make install as per the INSTALLATION file. So, that's just 'make', no 'make all', 'make doc'; just 'make' with an appropriate prefix.
Then run a make install (as root).
This will give you git without any documentation. To get the documentation, rather than build it, which is a heavy process (installing asciidoc is large!) grab the manpages tarball from the same location above, and untar it to the man pages area:
tar -xf "downloaded manpages file" -C /usr/share/man --no-same-owner
(more useful info here).
