GitHub For Beginners: Don’t Get Scared, Get Started

If you are like me (i.e. a beginner in most things programming related), you may find a lot of value in these very well-explained articles from Lauren Orsini:


GitHub For Beginners: Commit, Push And Go

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Here’s the hyperlink to the second article:

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Great resource thanks!

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Git is great, but I want to highly recommend looking into SourceTree for managing your repositories. I was amazed it took me over a year of working with Git before I even heard about it. It is a visual interface for managing your repos, so you can spend less time remembering commands and more time programming.

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GitKraken is another great visual interface tool for version control.

Nice @porcoespinho

Can you do one for ‘Git Flow’ as well?

Thanks for the info! I have been one of those with a GitHub account, but afraid I will break it. Maybe I will even try the official tutorial that keeps popping up on my profile :smiley:

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What would you break? Essentially the only thing you’d be able to do is “delete the entire repo” but since Github has a “hierarchy” system of “owner, managers, users” you’d have to be a manager or higher to do that sort of thing of deleting the entire repo. The worst thing you’d do is push bad code or redundant code to a repo, thereby someone would “revert” your commit/change and nothing worse-for-wear would be done.

To put it into context, if you’ve ever edited Wikipedia or another wiki project (like Wikia) and checked the history of things, you’ve seen the “+/-” changes they have which shows what has been added or removed from the article.

The same thing with Github. If you have a Codecademy account, they have a Github (well, Git) tutorial which is command-line based and teaches you this concept.

Yup, I did the free parts of the CodeCademy tutorial, the rest is paid. So I will go do the Udacity course on it as an audit, and maybe feel more confident. Thanks! :+1:

AFAIK, it wouldn’t really matter in regards to Udacity teaching you anything more than Codecademy. Essentially you’re gonna want to dig in eventually and do it.

I use the drag and drop they’ve introduced recently (which has a 25MB limit per upload), but if you want to do the command line This should help. Basically, I’d suggest making a repo and just putting whatever you complete on FreeCodeCamp into it to get comfortable and have a “backup” of what you’ve been doing in case your computer has a problem. You can even make an HTML page if you want to test things on there and/or make a portfolio page. It’ll be saved as a repository on your GitHub account.

Great link, thanks for the suggestion!

The HTML page looks very interesting. Maybe this weekend I will work a little over at GitHub on my personal page, and the tutorial. Thanks :+1:

Thanks For sharing the great resource with us

I can’t tell you how many times Git has saved me because I deleted files by mistake. Go learn Git, now, period.

To add to this before I forget: It’s not exactly like Wikipedia. Wikipedia has you “push” your changes to the main article (we’ll call it “repo” here since that’s what Github calls it essentially).

Whereas on Git(hub) you’d need to be a project manager or the owner (so you’d have to have created the repo/“article”), if you’re below that you can post your changes, but the “managers” are the ones that’ll “commit” it to the main branch of the repo.

I’m sure someone else can explain it better. But think of it as a mix of “chain of command” from your workplace with the ability have wikipedia-like revisions and reverting ability and you have Git(hub)'s main thing.

Essentially it’d be like…

main
-> forked
–>forked changes <–You “pushed” this.

(A manager checks)

main
->forked (your changes are pushed to this)

(Another manager checks to see if they want it to be part of the “main” source)
Main (your changes are “committed”)

…Hopefully that explination makes some sense. :confused: