A brief podcast on how to get started with this extremely popular source code manager.

What is Git?

Git is an open source distributed version control system. It is fast, and small making it an extremely popular subversioning software SCM (Source Code Manager). Some of its competitors are Subversion (SVN), CVS, Perforce, and Clear Case.

you use it for tracking updates and versions of files and text documents. You can track all types of files, but it is most useful for Software source code, weapplications.

Lets get started

– Git can be a little tough

– Understand it best through the command line

– A good resource is Git Essential Training with Kevin Skoglund

– installing git tutorials from git-scm.com or github.com

Preview of Git Essential Training on Lynda.com

Get 10 days of free unlimited access to lynda.com.

Git on Mac

– install apples command line tools.

– access it with Terminal

Git on Windows

– In the main Git web site, it’s going to be at http://git-scm.com.

– download the exe. walk you through the steps. stick with the defaults

– Git Bash (Bash is unix environment – very similar to environment that unix users look at. Git Bash has the same commands that Unix users are used to. This is how you can control Git in a command line environment

Now that we have looked at how to get Git and install it let’s get up and running with it. I would like to point out that you can set configurations and settings for your installation, but I’m not going to go into that. At this point you can use Git and This tutorial is more about getting your feet wet and using it. I feel that if you can get used to using it, it will make learning the intricacies of a program much easier. For this tutorial I’ll focus primarily on the basics and let you know where you can go to dig deeper.

The basic work flow of using Git is to navigate to the folder you want track with git, initialize it, add files to your staging area, then commit those changes. As you make changes to files you’ll commit those changes to your project. You can comment on those commits making it easy to keep track your updates. If you work as part of a team – members can check out files, then commit them back to the master repository. As you are developing you can revert back to any previous version of the project. To do this you would check out a previous version, make your changes, then merge them or keep them separated as a branch of that project. Branches allow you to maintain completely independent versions of the project; this way you can test or work on potential ideas for the project without affecting the main branch of project – this encourages experiementation; create a branch, experienment and if it isn’t going to work, just abondin it – it isn’t going to hurt your master, but if it does, just merge the changes into your master and delete the master.

Git is great because it allows you develop in one folder. All your ideas, experiments, testing and team involvement can all be done in one folder. Git is part of your working directory. As you check out and develop different versions of your project, Git will add or remove files that are associated with that version in real time – when you first get started it might seem like magic. I know when I started working with branches it seems crazy to see files drop in or out of my working directory – one second they were there and the...