Technology & Coding

Git and GitHub From Scratch

Track your work, branch fearlessly, and collaborate on GitHub without breaking anything or losing code.

This course is for members

$9 unlocks every course in the library, this one included, plus a credit to build a topic of your own and at least 10 new courses every month.

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What you will learn about Git and GitHub From Scratch

The 7-day sprint
  1. What Git Tracks and How to Start. Git is a tool that records snapshots of a folder over time, and a repository is that folder plus the hidden history Git keeps inside it.
  2. Staging and Committing. Work moves through three places, the working directory, the staging area, and the committed history, and you control each hop deliberately.
  3. Reading History and Undoing Mistakes. Git's real power is inspection and reversal, so learn to read the log and diffs before you learn anything clever.
  4. Branches and Merging. A branch is just a movable label pointing at a commit, which makes trying things out cheap and reversible.
  5. GitHub and Remotes. GitHub hosts a copy of your repository on a server, and push, fetch, and pull move commits between your copy and that one.
  6. Pull Requests and Project Hygiene. A pull request is a proposal to merge one branch into another, wrapped in a conversation, and it is how nearly all team work on GitHub happens.
  7. Workflow, Rebase, and Rescue. Competence is a repeatable daily loop plus knowing that almost nothing in Git is truly lost.
The 80/20: the 7 concepts that matter most
  • The commit as an immutable snapshot
  • The three areas and the staging step
  • Branches are cheap pointers, and HEAD says where you are
  • Merging, conflicts, and the merge base
  • Remotes: push, fetch, and pull
  • The pull request as a unit of collaboration
  • The undo toolbox: restore, revert, reset, stash, reflog
The core idea, explained like you are 5

A commit is an immutable snapshot of your whole project that also remembers which snapshot came before it, so your history is a linked chain of states rather than a list of edits.

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.