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)

Learning Git in a visual manner

The last thing I'd like to share with readers is a web app I found useful at the very beginning for better understanding the way Git works.

Learn Git Branching (https://learngitbranching.js.org/) is a tremendously helpful web app that offers you some exercises to help you grow your Git culture. Starting from a basic commit exercise, you learn how to branch, rebase, and so on, but the really cool thing is that on the right of the page, you will see a funny repository graph evolving in real time, following the commands you type in the emulated shell:

Another good resource of this kind is Visualizing Git Concepts with D3, where you can grasp all the most important commands visually. Find it at https://onlywei.github.io/explain-git-with-d3/: