Help and resources

Help and Resources

The scariest thing to know about git is that there is always more to know, and you will probably never use all the available command, or even feel the need for them. But the documentation is really good, and easily available. When in doubt or completely lost, always refer to the Pro Book.

But for each command there is an faster way:

git nameOfTheCommand help
#or
man git-nameOfTheCommand

Also there are lots of alternative clients to git, graphical tools and integrations in IDEs. Here you won't make use of any of them, for the simple reason that the command line is always available on any system where you will find git, and we will focus on the concepts. Most Gui clients for git assume you are familiar with those and won't take you by the end, here we will :-)

Other tutorials

Preparing this tutorial other came up, and we got inspired by them to different extend, but all of them cover the same basic functionalities. Here they are as references and as other teaching material you might want to use later on:

• http://gitready.com/
• http://gitimmersion.com/
• https://github.com/Gazler/githug
• http://try.github.com/levels/1/challenges/1

Graphical Interfaces

This list is non exhaustive, and does not cover all possibilities, but they are good pointers at first:

• Git GUIs:

  • gitk: always available on all platforms, a must have, simply the fastest implementation to navigate through branches and history
  • gitg: Linux tool, easier on the eye than gitk, but not as fast, can display the files and display git blame
  • gitx: Mac OSx tool. I never tried myself but I've only got good feedback on it (on m'en dit le plus grand bien. Le patron vous apportera un ramequin, vous vous ferez une idée)
  • Tortoise git: similar to tortoise svn on Windows, but after testing it more than a year ago I was far from impressed, pretty buggy, maybe better now.

• IDEs integration:

  • Qt creator: does a pretty good job at implementing many features. In particular git blame is interactive and colorful.
  • Eclipse: also a descent coverage, albeit some users reported some inconsistencies sometimes. Not being a user, I can't judge.
  • Emacs: recent versions have built-ins support for git, older ones will make use of magit

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