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 GUI clients

When beginning to learn a new tool, especially such a wide and complex one as Git, it can be useful to take advantage of some GUI tools, to be able to picture commands and patterns in a simpler way to understand.

Git benefits from a wide range of GUI tools, so it's only a matter of choice; I want to tell you right away that there is not one perfect tool, as frequently happens, but there are enough of them to pick the one that best fits your needs.

Windows

As a Microsoft .NET developer, I use Windows 99% of the time; in my spare time, I play a little bit with Linux, but in that case, I prefer to use the command line. In this section, you will find tools I use or have used in the past, while in the other...