Book Image

Git Essentials - Second Edition

By : Ferdinando Santacroce
Book Image

Git Essentials - Second Edition

By: Ferdinando Santacroce

Overview of this book

Since its inception, Git has attracted skilled developers due to its robust, powerful, and reliable features. Its incredibly fast branching ability transformed a piece of code from a niche tool for Linux Kernel developers into a mainstream distributed versioning system. Like most powerful tools, Git can be hard to approach since it has a lot of commands, subcommands, and options that easily confuse newcomers. The 2nd edition of this very successful book will help you overcome this fear and become adept in all the basic tasks in Git. Building upon the success of the first book, we start with a brief step-by-step installation guide; after this, you'll delve into the essentials of Git. For those of you who have bought the first edition, this time we go into internals in far greater depth, talking less about theory and using much more practical examples. The book serves as a primer for topics to follow, such as branching and merging, creating and managing a GitHub personal repository, and fork and pull requests. You’ll then learn the art of cherry-picking, taking only the commits you want, followed by Git blame. Finally, we'll see how to interoperate with a Subversion server, covering the concepts and commands needed to convert an SVN repository into a Git repository. To conclude, this is a collection of resources, links, and appendices to satisfy even the most curious.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Git objects

In Chapter 1, Getting Started with Git, we created an empty folder (in C:\Repos\MyFirstRepo) and then we initialized a new Git repository, using the git init command.

Let's create a new repository to refresh our memory and then start learning a little bit more about Git.

In this example, we use Git to track our shopping list before going to the grocery; so, create a new grocery folder, and then initialize a new Git repository:

[1] ~
$ mkdir grocery

[2] ~
$ cd grocery/

[3] ~/grocery
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in C:/Users/san/Google Drive/Packt/PortableGit/home/grocery/.git/

As we have already seen before, the result of the git init command is the creation of a .git folder, where Git stores all the files it needs to manage our repository:

[4] ~/grocery (master)
$ ll
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 1 san 1049089 0 Aug 17 11:11 ./
drwxr-xr-x 1 san 1049089 0...