Git has significantly changed the way teams develop software. Its distributed nature and lightweight branching and merging have made it possible for developers to massage their code bases in ways they couldn’t have imagined before. However, Git has a reputation for being hard to learn. And when folks transition to Git, they often settle for using a handful of commands and treat Git just like their other source control system. But because of its different approach to source control issues, many of the techniques and terminology we have learned in other source control systems do not translate cleanly when using Git. To begin to use Git effectively, you need to understand the underlying concepts.

In this 49-minute screencast you’ll learn Git in a different way: By not learning about Git itself. Instead, Jim Weirich takes you on a journey of how you might design and build a source control system from scratch. Along the way you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the first principles behind Git so things begin to make more sense.

This screencast is for people who haven’t used Git yet and are thinking about it, and for people who have just started using Git, but are still in the “magic incantation” stage of learning. It’s a great introduction to source control for your manager, too! No prior experience with Git or source control systems is required.

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All the episodes in this series have been released.

 

Contents

This screencast covers the following topics:

  • The project archive: files, manifests, and metadata
  • Detecting duplication using SHA1
  • Ensuring the integrity of the project archive
  • Tags
  • Branches
  • Merging changes from different branches
  • Sharing code in a distributed way

About the Presenter

Jim Weirich has been active in the software development world for over twenty-five years. Jim is very active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects including the Rake build system, the FlexMock mocking library, and the RubyGems package management software. Jim is the Chief Scientist for EdgeCase, LLC.