Introduction

The primary goal of this book is to introduce you, thinBasic developer, to the concept of Git in connection with GitHub.

The secondary goal is to set some boundaries and common practices for Git interaction across our growing community.

No previous knowledge of Git is expected or required in order to read this book.

All opinions expressed in this book are a view of the author, who has 5-year experience with Git. This is not an official Git guide.

This book is practically oriented on the common day-to-day tasks. Once you get confident with them and understand the benefits of Git for them, further study of Git is highly encouraged.

This book is currently work-in-progress

What do I gain learning Git?

Using Git through your development will allow you the following:

• track changes from the start of the project till its current state
• compare changes, line-by-line, between two versions of the code
• work on multiple variants without the need for crazy copy-paste
• feel more confident during bigger changes, because you can always safely go back
• collaborate on single code with others in a standardized, organized way
• have code accessible anywhere, because it can be stored in the cloud

Git is a version control system which became the de-facto standard, used by both individuals, developers of operating systems and big companies.

By learning Git, you learn a tool which you can re-use with different languages and in different situations.

What is GitHub?

GitHub is one of the providers of storage for the Git data. There are many alternatives, such as GitLab, SourceForge or Stash.

GitHub is chosen as a single example for this book, for the purpose of simplicity, while providing free accounts for your experiments.

How to read this book?

This book is written in a goal-oriented fashion. The best way to get the most out of this book is to start applying what you read immediately, even if on a dummy project.