Cloud architect with an irrational affinity for Azure

2 minute read

There’s already a ton of Git tutorials out there, so I’m just going to point you to them. This will be another brief post.

I would suggest setting aside 8 hours either all at once or spread out over a few days to learn Git. I think it will take less time than that (no shame if not).

Oh and if you’re wondering why you’re bothering to learn Git, see my Git post.

Installation

If you’re using a Mac or Linux computer, you probably already have Git installed. Windows does not come with Git installed by default, so you’ll have to install it yourself. A simple way to test on any operating system is to run the following command.

git -v

You should see output similar to git version 2.43.0. If not, follow these steps to install Git.

Starter

The Git Immersion site has an easy-to-follow tutorial with a pretty interface. It covers a lot of things, but if you took about 15 minutes each day, you could knock it out in about week or two.

Git Immersion

Intermediate

The official Git documentation site has the short and sweet gittutorial, which I actually find to be a bit difficult. Nevertheless, it covers the basics and is a solid tutorial.

gittutorial

There are a few things with this tutorial that can be confusing for beginners, so here’s some pointers.

  • In the Importing a new project section, they tell you to unzip a tarball with the command tar xzf project.tar.gz, but they don’t supply an example tarball file for you. I created one that you can download here.
  • When committing messages, you will be dropped into a file editor and how that file editor works will be different depending on your operating system. To get around that, use the -m option to specify the commit message, like this: git commit -m "Update webpage link".
  • This tutorial refers to the default branch as the legacy master which was the default branch names years ago. Your Git client is more likely to use the newer default of main, so replace all references of master with main in the tutorial.
  • If you’re using a Mac, you’re probably not going to have the gitk utility installed, so you can run the following to install it.
brew update
brew install git-gui

Challenging

Finally and optionally, if you’ve got the guts, try the Learn Git Branching interactive tutorial. This starts out really easy and gets really hard really fast, for real.

Learn Git Branching

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