Hello again, everyone! In my role as an industry professional-turned-college instructor, I definitely see my fair share of students struggling with Git.
And who can blame ’em? It’s a seemingly-overcomplicated system with lots of pitfalls and merge conflicts and detached heads and remotes and cherrypicks and rebases and an endless array of other commands that do who-knows-what.
Which leads us directly to the goal: let’s make sense of all this. We’ll start off easy (allegedly) with commands mixed in with some theory of operation. And we’ll see that understanding what Git does under the hood is critical to using it correctly.
And I promise there’s definitely a chance that after you get through some of this guide, you might actually start to appreciate Git and like using it.
I’ve been using it for years (I’m using it for the source code for this guide right now) and I can certainly vouch for it becoming easier over time, and then, even, second nature.
But first, some boilerplate!
The initial draft of this guide was put online for the university students where I worked (or maybe still work, depending on when you’re reading this) as an instructor. So it’s pretty natural to assume that’s the audience I had in mind.
But I’m also hoping that there are enough other folks out there who might get something of use from the guide as well, and I’ve written it in a more general sense with all you non-college students in mind.
This guide assumes that you have basic POSIX shell (i.e. Bash, Zsh, etc.) usage skills, i.e.:
cd, ls, mkdir, cp, etc.It also assumes you’re in a Unix-like environment, e.g. Linux, BSD, Unix, macOS, WSL, etc. with a POSIX shell. The farther you are away from that (e.g. PowerShell, Commodore 64), the more manual translation you’ll have to do.
Windows is naturally the sticking point, there. Luckily Git for Windows comes with a Bash shell variant called Git Bash. You can also install WSL1 to get a Linux environment running on your Windows box. I wholeheartedly recommend this for hacker types, since Unix-like systems are hacker-awesome, and additionally I recommend you all become hacker types.
This official location of this document is (currently) https://beej.us/guide/bggit/2.
I’m generally available to help out with email questions so feel free to write in, but I can’t guarantee a response. I lead a pretty busy life and there are times when I just can’t answer a question you have. When that’s the case, I usually just delete the message. It’s nothing personal; I just won’t ever have the time to give the detailed answer you require.
As a rule, the more complex the question, the less likely I am to respond. If you can narrow down your question before mailing it and be sure to include any pertinent information (like platform, compiler, error messages you’re getting, and anything else you think might help me troubleshoot), you’re much more likely to get a response.
If you don’t get a response, hack on it some more, try to find the answer, and if it’s still elusive, then write me again with the information you’ve found and hopefully it will be enough for me to help out.
Now that I’ve badgered you about how to write and not write me, I’d just like to let you know that I fully appreciate all the praise the guide has received over the years. It’s a real morale boost, and it gladdens me to hear that it is being used for good! :-) Thank you!
You are more than welcome to mirror this site, whether publicly or privately. If you publicly mirror the site and want me to link to it from the main page, drop me a line at beej@beej.us.
If you want to translate the guide into another language, write me at beej@beej.us and I’ll link to your translation from the main page. Feel free to add your name and contact info to the translation.
Please note the license restrictions in the Copyright and Distribution section, below.
Beej’s Guide to Git is Copyright © 2024 Brian “Beej Jorgensen” Hall.
With specific exceptions for source code and translations, below, this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
One specific exception to the “No Derivative Works” portion of the license is as follows: this guide may be freely translated into any language, provided the translation is accurate, and the guide is reprinted in its entirety. The same license restrictions apply to the translation as to the original guide. The translation may also include the name and contact information for the translator.
The programming source code presented in this document is hereby granted to the public domain, and is completely free of any license restriction.
Educators are freely encouraged to recommend or supply copies of this guide to their students.
Contact beej@beej.us for more information.
The hardest things about writing these guides are:
A lot of people have helped me through this process, and I want to acknowledge those who have made this book possible:
Thank you! ♥