GitHub for beginners
June 10, 2019 7:12 AM   Subscribe

I'm working on a small distributed project. Folks would like me to upload a few things (html documents) to GitHub. So, I need to get up to speed, at least as a basic user. Any resources that you would recommend? Video resources preferred. Thank you!

Anything welcome! - I can triage stuff against my abilities at this end. Many thanks!
posted by carter to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: I can strongly recommend the free, video-based Github course at Udacity, which I followed last month.

It's chopped up into bite-size pieces, and it does take awhile (several hours) to get through the whole course, but each chunk is very easy to complete. At the end you have a solid understanding of what Github does, even if you might have to look up specific commands on the cheat sheet later when you use them.
posted by Umami Dearest at 8:16 AM on June 10, 2019 [4 favorites]


Best answer: Hi, GitHub employee here. I don't have much in the way of video for you but I do have some interactive tutorials. This is our "official" intro and we recently launched GitHub Learning Lab which includes a variety of interactive courses. There's also Git-it, which is a desktop app that aims to teach you how to use GitHub.
posted by jordemort at 8:17 AM on June 10, 2019 [6 favorites]


Best answer: Oh, I guess I do have video for you, we have a YouTube Channel.
posted by jordemort at 8:27 AM on June 10, 2019 [3 favorites]


Response by poster: Yay, thank you both. This will get me started. Very useful. Off to make more coffee ...
posted by carter at 8:43 AM on June 10, 2019


Response by poster: Further suggestions still welcome btw ...
posted by carter at 9:01 AM on June 10, 2019


Best answer: There are a lot of different ways that people use Git. You should talk to your collaborators and ask them if they have a workflow they prefer, and then just learn to do exactly the things you will need for that workflow. In the best case you may not even need to branch or merge files in which case life will be pretty simple!

For example, some people really want you to do something called a "rebase and squash". But if your collaborators don't do that, then you don't have to worry about understanding what a rebase or a squash even is. There are lots of complicated features that you will simply be better off ignoring.

On the other hand, putting in the time to understand the basic idea of what a git repository is (big tree of commits, each commit with a hash, and tags/branches as just references to specific commits) is worth doing, as it will make everything else make much more sense.

For moral support you may enjoy this amusing comic.
posted by vogon_poet at 9:11 AM on June 10, 2019 [1 favorite]


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