Beginning Git

In the last several years, distributed version control has revolutionized the way we do development. Among the various DVCS offerings, Git is a popular, flexible and advanced open-source tool that increases team productivity as less time is spent on merge conflicts and branching becomes painless.

This course covers how to practically use Git, while also providing a solid foundation for how Git works under the hood. Abandon your CVS pushbike and board your new Git helicopter!

Target audience

Developers interested in learning how to use Git as a revision control system.

Prerequisites

Basic skills in managing files in either Windows or Linux. Preferably some familiarity with command-line interfaces.

What you will learn

What's version control?

• Why do we want it?

A quick history

• RCS, CVS, SVN
• Centralized vs distributed
• Merging: a solution that turned into a problem

Walkthrough exercise I

• init, add, commit
• status, log, diff
• branch, checkout, (simple) merge

Understanding the DAG

• blobs, trees, commits
• gitk
• SHA hashes

Going distributed

• Adding remotes to your project
• A pull is a fetch and a merge
• A centralized location?
• Hosted git

Walkthrough exercise II

• remote, clone, push, pull
• resolving conflicts
• Rebasing