Book Image

Git for Programmers

By : Jesse Liberty
Book Image

Git for Programmers

By: Jesse Liberty

Overview of this book

Whether you’re looking for a book to deepen your understanding of Git or a refresher, this book is the ultimate guide to Git. Git for Programmers comprehensively equips you with actionable insights on advanced Git concepts in an engaging and straightforward way. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll gain expertise (and confidence) on Git with lots of practical use cases. After a quick refresher on git history and installation, you’ll dive straight into the creation and cloning of your repository. You’ll explore Git places, branching, and GUIs to get familiar with the fundamentals. Then you’ll learn how to handle merge conflicts, rebase, amend, interactive rebase, and use the log, as well as explore important Git commands for managing your repository. The troubleshooting part of this Git book will include detailed instructions on how to bisect, blame, and several other problem handling techniques that will complete your newly acquired Git arsenal. By the end of this book, you’ll be using Git with confidence. Saving, sharing, managing files as well as undoing mistakes and basically rewriting history will be a breeze.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
11
Finding a Broken Commit: Bisect and Blame
13
Next Steps
14
Other Books You May Enjoy
15
Index

Avoiding conflicts

Avoiding conflict is generally a good thing to do, and in the case of Git, it is a very good thing indeed. Rather than having to resolve a whole lot of conflicts all at once, you really want to catch those conflicts as you go (and thus handle just one or two at a time). If you are on a team, some conflicts cannot be avoided, but there are two good rules of thumb to cut down drastically on the work involved in handling conflicts:

  • Do not have more than one programmer working on any given file (if possible)
  • Merge main into your feature branch very frequently

Notice #2 does not say to merge your feature branch into main, but rather the other way around. This will not endanger the main thread, but will quickly reveal if there are any conflicts so far. If so, you can fix them in your branch and move on.