Git

Overview

When working on large programming projects, it’s important to be able to collaborate with others, share code, keep track of what’s changed between versions, and to annotate why things are changing.

These are the types of problems that Git solves. Git is a “distributed version control system” (DVCS), but knowing what that means isn’t necessary to figure out how to use it effectively. Basically, Git is a technology that allows for rapid code sharing, lightweight “branching” (making it easy to work on different features in the codebase), and much more.

A lot of people confuse Git with GitHub when they first start learning it. To clarify, GitHub uses the Git technology at its core. GitHub is designed to be a nice, graphical frontend that emphasizes “social coding.” It has features that empower people to collaborate on open source projects, discover new projects, and more. People use GitHub for the most part by interacting with Git on the command line. Every once in a while, they can “synchronize” their most recent work with the work available on GitHub. (this isn’t the best analogy for what’s happening, but let’s roll with it).

Git has a command line interface; we’ll be showing you some basic features of how to use it so you can hit the ground running.

Lessons

• Getting Started With Git

• Git Command Overview

• Using Git on GitHub

Resources

Before Getting Started with Git

• Try Git
  • An interactive Git tutorial, put together by Code School and available through GitHub.
  • Targets first-time Git users, takes about 15 minutes. Make sure to read the “Advice” for a deeper understanding.
• Git - The Simple Guide
  • Straight-forward summary of the Git commands everyone needs to know to use Git on a day-to-day basis

Once you’ve used Git for a while

• Learn Git Branching
  • Interactive, very well designed tutorial that covers just about everything there is to know about Git branching. Depicts what’s happening visually on top of just demonstrating the commands.
• A Hacker’s Guide to Git
  • My absolute favorite guide to Git. Everyone who uses Git should read this at some point, as it really demystifies a large portion of how Git works.

When you’re comfortable using Git in the real world

• A Successful Git Branching Model
  • High-level overview of how to use Git’s branches to manage features, releases, hotfixes, bugfixes, etc.
• Pro Git
  • The official Git documentation. Very comprehensive, very lengthy. I find it more useful to look up specific things in this book rather than read it all the way through, though it certainly could be approached that way.