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)

Useful techniques

In this section, we will improve our skills, learning some techniques that will come in handy in different situations.

Git stash - putting changes temporally aside

It sometimes happens that you need to switch branches for a moment, but some changes are in progress in the current branch. To put aside those changes for a while, we can use the git stash command: let's give it a try in our grocery repository.

Append a new fruit to the shopping list, then try to switch branch; Git won't allow you to do so, because with the checkout you would lose your local (not yet committed) changes to the shoppingList.txt file. So, type the git stash command; your changes will be set apart and removed from your...