GIT 101

After hearing a lot about distributed source code management (SCM) systems lately, I’ve been playing around with GIT and I like it a lot. As a longtime user of traditional SCMs like CVS and Subversion, working with GIT is something of a revelation and so nothing seems more natural than spreading the gospel a little 🙂

To help other people learn about GIT, I’ve collected some of the most interesting GIT 101 stuff I’ve found around the net.

The Basics

• The GIT homepage: a good place to start. The documentation page has all the starting points you need.
• The official GIT tutorial
• The GIT User Manual: a very exhaustive guide to everything you’ll ever need to know about GIT
• GIT Merging By Example: shows the awesome power of GIT merging in action.

GIT vs Subversion

• The GIT-SVN crash course: a good starting point for people switching to GIT from SVN
• A git-svn Tutorial: a good tutorial for using git locally while still working with a central SVN repository.
• Why GIT Is Better Than X: a good summary of arguments why GIT is better than any other SCM and also a good introduction to some of the most basic features of GIT
• Three reasons to switch to GIt from Subversion

Screencasts

• Linus Torvalds on GIT: the creator of GIT explains it all… including his opinion of SVN users.
• GitCasts: a great and growing collection of screencasts on GIT basics. This also includes a presentation on GIT internals that the author gave at RailsConf 2008.
• Grails and GIT Quickcast: a cool screencast that shows how GIT integrates very well with Grails development.

ToolsGitX

• Egit: The GIT eclipse plugin. Still in its early stages but pretty useful already. If you’d rather use another IDE, Idea IntelliJ 8.1 has GIT integration, Netbeans support has just started, and of course there’s always Emacs.
• GitX: An Max OSX version of the built-in Gitk tool. Same functionality, much better looking.

And finally, the GitHub (awesome !) Guides section contains a lot more information and enough starting points to keep you reading and watching screencasts for hours.

Hopefully this will help get you started with GIT. Please leave a comment when you’ve found other interesting GIT resources.