Why a links post about Git? There are plenty of resources, right? Exactly! There’s almost too many resources around Git and you can reach a profiency in Git with just a few.

For fun, check out the results of this search for git books vs svn books. Hopefully this post will help you to never need to go through that list.

Some Opinions

It’s funny to me that git is a tool one can become skilled at. When using svn I never felt that I had to learn advanced things (I did own one of those books listed above though). Perhaps it’s more a sign of the times and the number of people in software has grown immensely; which is great!.

Start with just the bare bones git CLI. All those helper tools like tig, gitx, and IDE integrations will hide what’s going on. Knowing how git works comes most handy when you’ve done something and you think all your code is lost. Learning through vanilla git commands will go far. Why learn another tools way of doing things when you can just use the underlying git commands?

Ignore the git cheat sheets out there. You’ll be able to make your own cheat sheets easily enough. Trust me, once you learn a bit of how the internals work, you’ll realise that it’s difficult to really screw things up. Source control is, hopefully, something you’ll be using every single day. The commands will become muscle memory quickly.

OK, I’ll get off my soap box.

Links

• Git from the inside out - Mary has written by far the best article I’ve read about git. It’s long, but if you get to the end with a focused effort, you’ll never need to stress about any git command. She even posted a video too!
• gitready.com - This site has been around when git first started and has a few good recipes that you should be able to understand well if you’ve read the above article. Yeah, there are cheat sheets, but you don’t need them now, right?
• The Human Git Graph - A great way to learn is to teach. I created this workshop for those that could use a different angle at understanding git. It’s a lot of fun and I would love to know if you try faciliating it yourself.

Summary

What? Just 3 links? Pretty much! The 2nd link has enough resources to keep you busy for days, but I don’t believe you need them. You can use that time to grow more important skills.

This post took 2 pomodoros to complete

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