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

This chapter barely scratches the surface, but I think it can be useful to get a sense of the topic. If you have wide Subversion repositories, you will probably need a better training before beginning to convert them to Git, but for small to medium ones, now you know the fundamentals to start moving away.

The only suggestion I want to share with you is to not be in a hurry; start letting Git cooperate with your Subversion server, reorganize the repository when it is messy, take a lot of backups, and finally, try to convert it; you will probably convert it more than once, as I did, but you will get satisfaction in the end.

In the next chapter, I will share with you some useful resources I found during my career as a Git user.