diff --git a/book/02-git-basics/sections/recording-changes.asc b/book/02-git-basics/sections/recording-changes.asc
index e48751fcf..bdafe9a06 100644
--- a/book/02-git-basics/sections/recording-changes.asc
+++ b/book/02-git-basics/sections/recording-changes.asc
@@ -226,7 +226,7 @@ The rules for the patterns you can put in the `.gitignore` file are as follows:
 *  You can negate a pattern by starting it with an exclamation point (`!`).
 
 Glob patterns are like simplified regular expressions that shells use.
-An asterisk (`*`) matches zero or more characters; `[abc]` matches any character inside the brackets (in this case a, b, or c); a question mark (`?`) matches a single character; and brackets enclosing characters separated by a hyphen (`[0-9]`) matches any character between them (in this case 0 through 9).
+An asterisk (`\*`) matches zero or more characters; `[abc]` matches any character inside the brackets (in this case a, b, or c); a question mark (`?`) matches a single character; and brackets enclosing characters separated by a hyphen (`[0-9]`) matches any character between them (in this case 0 through 9).
 You can also use two asterisks to match nested directories; `a/**/z` would match `a/z`, `a/b/z`, `a/b/c/z`, and so on.
 
 Here is another example `.gitignore` file: