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Git

Learning resources from the Prescription Free Academy of Web Development and Software Engineering.

"Master software engineering for the web with teaching and mentoring available seven days."

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You’re reading our Class Notes collection. It features summaries of important topics along with quality links to learn more.

This document is considered stable. Updates are made but what is here is considered enough as it stands to do the title justice.

Git

Git is an essential tool for any serious web developer, and useful for anyone working with code or even files in general. It’s a distributed version control system. It enables you to collaborate with others developing software by tracking changes and providing facilities to resolve conflicts.

It also works well to use alone. Enabling you to write code with confidence, knowing that you can easily switch back to the last point that you committed your changes to the repository.

Git is commonly used with what’s termed a remote, which enables everyone to access the repository, along with backing up work as you go.

You can set up your own remote server, but it’s common to use a platform. Some popular ones are GitHub, BitBucket and GitLab. As well as providing a Git remote server, these platforms provide a whole host of useful features that work with or around your Git repository.

Where to find out more? Let’s get in to it.

GitHub Skills

The GitHub Skills site features a massive range of quality resources to help you with both using GitHub itself and with all of the features that GitHub itself has.

GitHub Skills
skills.github.com

Here are some highlights.

About GitHub and Git
docs.github.com

Getting Started with Git
docs.github.com

Using Git
docs.github.com

You may have heard of a “pull request” or PR for contributing code to projects. There’s a guided exercise to help learn what that’s all about. It’s a GitHub thing rather than Git itself.

Pull Request Tutorial Exercise
docs.github.com

And to mention a few more gems:

Set Up Git
docs.github.com

Download Files from GitHub
docs.github.com

Git and GitHub Learning Resources
docs.github.com

Writing on GitHub
docs.github.com

The Git Book: Pro Git

Once you’ve got the basics, or just because you like diving in, pick up and read at least the first three chapters of Pro Git. It’s from the official Git community and is excellent.

Pro Git
git-scm.com/book/en/v2

Git Community

Git has a shining example of an open source software community. Not only is it excellent software, led in its development by the same chap who is responsible for Linux - Linus Torvalds, but they provide top of the line support to the community with some incredible resources.

Git Community
git-scm.com

Linus Torvalds - Wikipedia
wikipedia.org

Here are those resources in more detail.

Documentation and Videos
git-scm.com/doc

GUI Clients
git-scm.com/downloads/guis

Git for Windows
git-scm.com/downloads/win

Finally there are ways that you can get involved in the Git community yourself, either to learn or to contribute yourself.

Get Involved
git-scm.com/community

For an added bonus, find the code for Git itself on GitHub:

GitHub - git/git: Git Source Code Mirror
github.com/git/git

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