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)

Summary

In this chapter, we enhanced our knowledge about Git and its wide set of commands. We discovered how configuration levels work, and how to set our preferences using Git by, for example, adding useful command aliases to the shell. Then we looked at how Git deals with stashes, providing the way to shelve then and reapply changes.

Furthermore, we added some other techniques to our skill set, learning some things we will use as soon as we start to use Git extensively. Some simple tricks provide a way to stimulate the curiosity of the reader: Git has a lot more commands to explore.

In the next chapter, we will leave the console for a while, and talk about strategies to better organize our repositories. We will try to learn how to make significant commits, and we will get to know some of the adoptable flows to reconcile Git with our way of working.

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