A short introduction to git

I gave a short talk at work that was intended to be a sound introduction to the basics of using git, and wrote a tutorial document to go along with that. In case that is of wider interest, I’ve now put a copy of the tutorial online. It is deliberately limited in scope at the moment, but I’d be interested in what people think of this style of introduction.


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6 responses to “A short introduction to git”

  1. CharlesB Avatar
    CharlesB

    Great article, much better introduction than most “step by step”‘s you can find. Thanks!

  2. compton Avatar

    Nicely written thanks! I’m in the process of implementing git at my workplace – it’s my first experience of a distributed VCS so I’m taking my time to get my head round some of its fundamental concepts!

  3. FergMcM Avatar
    FergMcM

    Great article, fills in the gaps left by the dozens of other short introductions.

  4. Stephane Avatar
    Stephane

    Thank you for this introduction.

    To a reader of The Guardian I would also recommend the reading of https://off-guardian.org

  5. Jose Ortiz Avatar
    Jose Ortiz

    Hi, Mark. Thanks for this tutorial. Several years later, it is still clearer than other resources I have read. I am recommending it to my colleagues.
    As I am new to git (besides the typical git clone command to download a repository from github), I was wondering if you consider your guide to be reasonably up-to-date, given the new releases of git itself. Are there any significant changes that I should consider? Or maybe new recommendations from your experience in this last years.
    Thanks!

    1. mark Avatar

      Hi Jose,

      Thanks for your very kind remarks, and I’m glad to hear this has been useful. I keep meaning to go back to add to it and rewrite some parts, and feel bad that I’ve not managed to do that yet.

      I had a quick scan through, and I think everything still applies, except for the bit where I said:

      “[…] since just doing git push origin will push every branch of yours that has a branch with the same name on the
      remote. Normally this isn’t what you would want.”

      This surprising default behaviour if a refspec isn’t included has changed in in Git 2.0 – see https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#git-config-pushdefault

      There’s the odd bit that’s a bit dated (e.g. pushing over HTTP / HTTPS being novel) but otherwise I think should all still apply.

      If you spot any problems (or find in sharing it with people any parts that are particularly confusing) I’d be interested to hear about that!

      Many thanks,
      Mark

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