How I Learned To Git (And You Can Too)

I’m a Software Engineer. About a year ago I moved job and the new role required me to learn to use Git for source control.

It was a bit of a culture shock moving from projects based mostly on Visual Source Safe to Git. I thought it’d be cool to list some of the resources I used to get up to speed.

Git is a distributed VCS (Version Control System) created by Linux founder Linus Torvalds. It’s free and becoming commonplace in industry. It’s also the tool of choice for Open Source developers. It might be quite hard to avoid in the next few years if you haven’t already been exposed to it.

I’d definitely recommend using the command line (Git Bash where Windows is concerned) as the best way to learn Git. That might be a bit of a culture shock for less technical users, but I found it was the best way to visualise what’s happening in the background.

The first tutorial below can be completed online, so you don’t have to install if that’s intimidating. You can also use a GUI client to carry out changes – Atlassian SourceTree is what I currently use.

How I Learned To Git (And You Can Too)