In our next baby step in learning to use the version control system Git, Bart teaches us how to track changes. We start by doing a bit of housekeeping, especially for Mac users to set Git to always ignore those pesky .DS_Store files. We learn how to stage and then commit a simple change, then we stage and commit multiple changes and even learn to see the differences in our staged files from the database all from the command line.

While we all think we're capable of making one structural change and then committing our changes, Bart knows that it isn't going to happen. But there's still a way to follow Helma's advice to "commit early and commit often". Bart teaches us how to divide the changes we inevitably make into separate commits with separate comments so we can figure out what we did later.

I enjoyed this installment because I could tell it was laying a very important foundation of understanding. You can follow along with Bart's famous shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net/...