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)

Before starting

In this first part of the chapter, we will take a look at best practices to maintain safety and work on actual SVN repository with no hassles.

Bear in mind that the purpose of this chapter is only to give readers some hints; dealing with big and complex repositories deserves a more prudent and articulated approach.

Installing a Subversion client

To be able to do these experiments, you need a Subversion tool; on Windows, the most widely used is the well-known TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.net), which provides command-line tools to both GUI and shell integration.

I recommend a full installation of TortoiseSVN, including command-line tools, as we'll need some of them to make experiments.

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