Is there a minimal installation of ADB? When it comes to troubleshooting, I often read recommendations like "Use adb logcat to find some more details". Looking for a good way to backup all my apps including their data, Full Backup of non-rooted devices refers to adb backup and adb restore. In several places one can find ways to remotely do on an Android device with the use of ADB, such as transferring files using adb push or adb pull, accessing the command-line via adb shell, and more. So ADB seems to be a good thing to have for an Android user.

But how to get this "ADB thingy" on my computer? Not being a developer, installing the entire Android SDK seems a bit overkill. Is there a more minimalistic approach available?
I do not really understand why anyone would prefer downloading an old version of unknown origin from a malware-ridden website to downloading the latest official version directly from Google itself. I guess to each its own.

Here are the links to the Google repository:

The latest version of the platform tools (contains just a few binaries - less than 10Mb in size each):


Windows
Linux
Mac


For users of Ubuntu and Debian (distributions I personally use) I have put together a small bash script which finds and installs the latest version of the platform tools - Installing Android platform tools (ADB) on Ubuntu