Painless Git
Painless Git
A Sane Person's Guide to Distributed Development
About the Book
Git is the lingua franca of team-based software development. And with good reason. Git is powerful, flexible, well-built, and battle hardened.
It can also be just a bit daunting. Merge conflicts pop up and litter your code with random rows of equal signs and angle brackets. You get great advice about rebasing instead of merging, which is a good idea except for those times where it's a bad idea. Stray too far into the weeds and you start hearing about "reflog" which sounds like "hitting someone again". that's no way to live.
Which is why I'm here. I've been teaching teams how to use git for about five years now, and trust me, I've seen every mess a team can get into with git.
Painless Git is a distillation of all the best git advice I've found over the years, helping you not only start using git, but start using it well. Once you've got a solid understanding of the basics of git, I'll help you build the confidence you need to find your way out of messes without resorting to the old "delete your working directory and start over" technique.
The Painless series is designed around developers who have a lot to do. I take it as read that you're intelligent and don't want to spend your time reading tech books. Painless Git is designed to be short, easy to read, and inexpensive, so you can learn how to manage distributed development quickly and get to work. I think you'll like this book and before too long you'll find that using git is actually fun, and learning it was, well, painless.
About the Author
Bundles that include this book
Table of Contents
-
-
Introduction
- What is git, and Why do I Need It?
- What This Book Aims to be
- What this book is not
- Who Am I?
- References
- Hey, Are There Any Conventions Used In this Book?
- Let’s “Git” Started!
-
How This Book is Structured
- What Are Interludes?
-
Introduction
-
Part I: Beginning
-
A Brief History of Git. The Briefest!
- The Linux Kernel
-
Installing Git
- Keeping Git up to Date
-
First Steps
- Creating a New Repository
- Quick Detour: Tell Git A Little About Yourself
- Okay, Back to Your First Commit
-
Fear of Commitment
- The Three Step Dance
- Staging Files
- What it Means to Commit
- The Anatomy of a Commit
- Pushing Git
-
Branching
- Branching: Split Apart
- Merging: Come Together
-
Branch Practice
- Learn Git Branching
- Extra Credit
-
Commits and Their Parents
- Terminology
-
Use Your
HEAD
-
Configuring and Ignoring
- Configuration: Here and Everywhere
- Ignore this text. Fnord.
- Git, Ignore!
-
.gitignoreis Bliss - Personalized Ignorance
-
Reaching Out: Working with Git Remotes
- Team Git Terminology
- Who Does Git Know?
- Two Remotes, No Waiting
-
Playing in the Sandbox
- The Github Option!
- The Non-Github Option
-
Interlude: Oops! I Broke Git!
- What Not To Do
- Reset or Revert
-
Conflict Resolution
- Artisanal, Hand-Crafted Fixes
- How Real People Resolve Git Conflicts
- In Either Case
-
Solo Git
- It’s Just Not That Hard
- It’s a Free Backup System
- Asking For Help Just Got Simpler
- You Can Try New Stuff
- Moving On
-
A Brief History of Git. The Briefest!
-
Part II: Refinement
-
Good Git Habits
- Commit Messages: Say Something Worth Saying
- Branch Names
-
Small Commits
- So How Often is “All the Time” In Practice?
- Worry About Merges, Not Commits
-
Branching Out
- Workflow 0: No Branching
- Workflow 1: Informal Branching
- Workflow 2: Autonomous Feature Branching
- Workflow 3: Formal Feature Branching
- Workflow 4: Git Flow
-
Good Git Hygiene
- Delete Old Branches
- Prune Frequently
- Taking out the Trash: Garbage Collection in git
-
Interlude A: Tools
- Git GUIs: Pretty Commit Trees!
- Diff/Merge Tools: Seeing What Changed, Fixing What Broke
- The Command Line!
-
Stashes: Quick, Hide Your Code!
- How to Actually Use Git Stash
- Refined
-
Good Git Habits
-
Part III: Sophistication
-
Use Sparingly: Git Commands You Should Use Less
- Amend: When What You Said Isn’t What You Meant
- Squash: Pretending History Didn’t Happen
- Rebase: Moving History
- Cherry-Pick: Moving One Commit to a New Branch
-
The Cases for and Against Bubbles
- The Case for Rebase
- Keeping the Mystery out of Your History
- The Verdict!
-
Delving Into
.git- The Directories
- Interlude: Selective Staging
-
Hooks
- Why would I want to do that?
-
Interlude: Commits Revisited
- First: Files in a Commit
- Second: Git Doesn’t Actually Store Files
- Third: Git Compresses
-
Getting the Elephant out of the Repo: Git’s Large File System
- Binary vs Text Files
- So Let’s Put Large Files Somewhere else!
- Then Follow The Directions!
- This Is All Easier if You Start Earlier
-
Shhh! We Are Talking About SSH!
- First off, What is SSH?
- What are the Benefits of Using SSH?
- Okay, Good Enough! How do I use it?
- Added Awesome
- Extra Awesome Non-Git Use of SSH
- Who Am Us, Anyway?
- Play It Again, Git: Using Git Rerere to Stop Repeating Yourself
-
It’s Ref-log, not Re-flog
- Show
- Expire
- Delete
- And That’s Pretty Much It!
- The End!
-
Use Sparingly: Git Commands You Should Use Less
-
Appendices
- Appendix B: Glossary
-
Appendix C: Terminal Velocity: Getting Up to Speed on the Command Line
- Tell Me What to Do: The Command
- Tell Me How to Do It: The Flags
- Tell Me What to Do It to: The Arguments
- Putting it All Together
- How do You Remember All This???
- Commands and Command Suites
- Unix-y Stuff
-
Appendix D: Commit or Commit-ish
- Specific References
- Relative References
-
Appendix E: SubGit
- Step 0: Bookmark the SubGit Documentation Page
- Step 1: Gather Information
- Initial Config
- Test! And Test Again!
-
About This Book
- About the Text
- About the Cover
- Special Thanks
- Notes
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