Technology & Coding

Git and GitHub From Scratch

Track every change in your projects with confidence and collaborate on GitHub without fear of losing work.

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What you will learn about Git and GitHub From Scratch

The 7-day sprint
  1. Your First Repository and First Commit. A Git repository is an ordinary folder plus a hidden .git directory that stores the complete history of that folder.
  2. The Staging Area and How Git Sees Changes. Every file lives in one of three places: the working tree you edit, the staging area you build a commit in, and the repository where commits are stored forever.
  3. Reading History and Undoing Mistakes. Git gives you a different undo command for each stage of the pipeline, and choosing the right one depends on whether the change is unstaged, staged, or already committed.
  4. Branches Are Just Movable Pointers. A branch is a lightweight, movable pointer to one commit, and HEAD is the pointer that says which branch you are currently on.
  5. Merging and Resolving Conflicts. Merging combines two branches by comparing both to their common ancestor, and a conflict happens only when both branches changed the same lines of the same file.
  6. Remotes, GitHub, and Pushing Your Work. A remote is a nickname for another copy of your repository, and pushing and pulling are just ways of syncing commits between your copy and that one.
  7. GitHub Flow and Pull Requests. The standard way teams work is GitHub flow: branch off main, push the branch, open a pull request, get it reviewed, merge, and delete the branch.
The 80/20: the 7 concepts that matter most
  • The three areas and the add-then-commit rhythm
  • A commit is an immutable snapshot with a parent
  • Branches and HEAD are pointers, not copies
  • Merging uses the common ancestor, so conflicts are narrow
  • Remotes: clone, fetch, pull, push
  • GitHub flow: short branch, pull request, review, merge
  • The undo toolkit and the rule about shared history
The core idea, explained like you are 5

A commit is a complete snapshot of your project at one moment, permanently linked to the snapshot that came before it, and everything else in Git and GitHub is built on that chain of snapshots.

Then the quiz and the ladder

10 questions that correct you when you are wrong, and beginner, intermediate, advanced levels, each with a practical exercise.

Created Sep 12, 2026. No mistakes have been reported by learners.

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