Git Essentials

Create, merge, and distribute code with Git, the most powerful and flexible versioning system available

About This Book

• Master all the basic concepts of Git to protect your code and make it easier to evolve
• Use Git proficiently, and learn how to resolve day-by-day tasks easily
• A step-by-step guide, packed with examples to help you learn and work with Git internals

Who This Book Is For

If you are a software developer with little or no experience of versioning systems, or are familiar with other centralized versioning systems, then this book is for you. If you have some experience working with command lines or using Linux admin or just using Unix and want to know more about Git, then this book is ideal for you.

What You Will Learn

• Create, branch, and merge a local repository
• Transport your work to a remote repository working in a centralized manner
• Organize your source code using feature branches
• Organize the development flow
• Get a meaningful changelog using clear commit messages
• Collaborate with teammates without any impediments
• Experiment with your code without affecting functional code files
• Explore some tools used to migrate to Git from other versioning systems without losing your development history
• Extend your knowledge of Git with some useful resources

In Detail

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 former 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 main purpose of Git Essentials is to help you overcome this fear and become adept at all basic tasks in Git. This book starts with an introduction to version control systems, and after this you'll delve deeply into the essentials of Git. This serves as a primer for the topics to follow such as branching and merging, creating and managing a GitHub personal repository, and fork and pull requests. You will then learn the art of cherry-picking, taking only commits you like, followed by Git blame. Finally, you'll learn how to migrate from SVN using Git tools or TortoiseGit and migrate from other VCSs, concluding with a collection of resources, links, and appendices.