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 references

In the previous section, we have seen that a Git repository can be imagined as a tree that, starting from a root (the root-commit), grows upward through one or more branches.

These branches are generally distinguished by a name. In this Git is no exception; if you remember, the experiments conducted so far led us to commit to the master branch of our test repository. Master is precisely the name of the default branch of a Git repository, somewhat like trunk is for Subversion.

But Subversion analogies end here: we will now see how Git handles branches, and for Subversion users it will be a little surprising.

It's all about labels

In Git, a branch is nothing more than a label, a mobile label placed...