Book Image

Mastering Git

5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Git

5 (1)

Overview of this book

Git is one of the most popular types of Source Code Management (SCM) and Distributed Version Control System (DVCS). Despite the powerful and versatile nature of the tool enveloping strong support for nonlinear development and the ability to handle large projects efficiently, it is a complex tool and often regarded as “user-unfriendly”. Getting to know the ideas and concepts behind the architecture of Git will help you make full use of its power and understand its behavior. Learning the best practices and recommended workflows should help you to avoid problems and ensure trouble-free development. The book scope is meticulously designed to help you gain deeper insights into Git's architecture, its underlying concepts, behavior, and best practices. Mastering Git starts with a quick implementation example of using Git for a collaborative development of a sample project to establish the foundation knowledge of Git operational tasks and concepts. Furthermore, as you progress through the book, the tutorials provide detailed descriptions of various areas of usage: from archaeology, through managing your own work, to working with other developers. This book also helps augment your understanding to examine and explore project history, create and manage your contributions, set up repositories and branches for collaboration in centralized and distributed version control, integrate work from other developers, customize and extend Git, and recover from repository errors. By exploring advanced Git practices, you will attain a deeper understanding of Git’s behavior, allowing you to customize and extend existing recipes and write your own.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Git
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 3. Developing with Git

The previous chapter explained how to examine the project history. This chapter will describe how to create such history and how to add to it. We will learn how to create new revisions and new lines of development. Now it's time to show how to develop with Git.

Here we will focus on committing one's own work, on the solo development. The description of working as one of the contributors is left for Chapter 5, Collaborative Development with Git, while Chapter 7, Merging Changes Together, shows how Git can help in maintainer duties.

This chapter will introduce the very important Git concept of the staging area (the index). It will also explain, in more detail, the idea of a detached HEAD, that is, an anonymous unnamed branch. Here you can also find a detailed description of the extended unified diff format that Git uses to describe changes.

The following is the list of the topics we will cover in this chapter:

  • The index – a staging area for commits

  • Examining the status...