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5 Resources to Help You Learn and Master Git and Version Control

Version control can be less of a hassle with these resources.

Photo by Markus Winkler from Pexels
Photo by Markus Winkler from Pexels

If you’re into tech, a programmer, a data scientist, or a web or app developer, then you know that one of the essential skills you know you need to master -or at least try to – is version control, or in particular, Git. Of course, there are different kinds of version control systems out there, but Git is probably the most known and used one.

Git is an example of a DVCS (Distributed Version Control System). In a distributed version control system, the history of your software is not stored and kept on a single device; rather, it is distributed across different machines and different users. For example, using Git, each development team member works on a copy of the code that contains a history of all changes that occurred on that code since it was originally created.

Git was designed to top other version control systems from the perspective of performance, security, and flexibility. If you are like me, then at one point in your tech journey, you attempted to learn Git and tried to practice it to master it at some point. And if you were like me, then maybe you have struggled to master Git and got frustrated with it at times.

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Of course, not everyone struggles with understanding and mastering Git, but many people actually do. The reason for this struggle is often when we learn using the same methodology. Which is just "memorize the basics, and you will get better at it with time." Although that’s a valid approach to learn anything, sometimes it’s not the most optimal way to learn something.

So, when I wanted to build solid Git knowledge, I looked through many resources to find ones that make understanding the inner mechanics of Git simple and straightforward. In this article, I will share some of these resources with you.

№1: Think Like (a) Git

Let’s start out with one of my favorite websites to learn Git, Think Like (a) Git. My favorite part about this website is their logo, or motto, which is "Git Shouldn’t be so hard to learn." As a skill that every programmer needs to know, I can’t agree with that statement more.

Git is built based on different concepts of graph theory, which is a mathematical field addressing graphs. Think Like (a) Git dedicated a whole chapter to discussing graph theory and how nodes and edges go, so Git makes more sense later on. After discussing graph theory, the website explains with examples the basics of Git and some usages to each concept.

№2: GitHub Docs

One of the great resources to learn Git is the GitHub docs. The GitHub team goes through a lot of trouble to make learning and mastering GitHub manageable for everyone. And their effort often pays off. If you want to learn GitHub from the source, it doesn’t get better than GitHub docs.

GitHub docs address every question you may have about Git and GitHub usage, from installing it locally to creating a repository to creating branches, merging them, pull requests, and syncing codebase locally and on the GitHub server. The docs address delivering these topics using a visual approach via snapshots from GitHub.

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№3: Git Tower

If you’re a beginner to Git and Programming and prefer books as a learning method, then this resource is for you. Git Tower is a free online, visual book that targets Git beginners and follows a simple, straightforward approach to teach you the different basics of Git and version control.

Git Tower is a visual explanation for everything Git and version control-related. From the absolute beginning of what’s version control to why we need to start with it, it then goes deeper into what’s Git, its basics, and more advanced topics related to it. Git Tower provides tutorials, videos, and cheat sheets to help you become a professional Git user.

№4: A Visual Git Reference

So far, we went through resources that discussed and explained Git and version control in a very detailed depth, starting with what version control is to more precise topics about GitHub. But, say you need to use GitHub now, and you want something simple, to the point, and that can be done within minutes, then the Visual Git Reference is for you.

Visual git Reference is a one-page website that visually explains the basic concepts of Git. It addresses the most common usage of Git, such as committing, checking out, merging, getting the difference between versions, and rebasing in a simple way that you can use right away.

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№5: Learn Git Branching

As we mentioned earlier, Git and GitHub are builds based on graph theory, which is a visual mathematical representation. And one of the basic working mechanics of GitHub is branching, creating, merging, and handling them. Learning Git Branching is a great visual, interactive resource to learn and master Git branching.

This resource is probably the one that my students and I benefited the most from; that way, it teaches branching, and dealing with them visually makes the concept itself easy to grasp and use. In addition, the website levels advance in a logical way that is easy to follow for both absolute beginners and professionals.

Takeaways

Version control is one of the more challenging concepts to learn for anyone joining the tech field in general. As a computer science instructor, Git is where most of my students struggle and get overwhelmed with the field. To make things easier for my students and myself, I looked for different resources to explain Git in various methods, pure text resources, visual resources, and interactive ones.

We are all different; we have different ways of learning and absorbing information; some prefer reading books and think it’s the best way to learn something. Others prefer watching videos or animations because they better understand things when presented visually. Some learn by trying, some by listening, and so on.

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I browsed hundreds of materials and resources, both when I was trying to learn Git and when I was trying to find the best approach to explain it and teach it to others. In this article, I shared with you some materials and resources to learn and master Git that addresses a wide range of delivery methods. Some are purely written tutorials, others explain things visually, and some teach by doing.

So, if you’re new to the tech field or someone who still feels a tad shaky about their Git knowledge, give some of the resources in this article a try; maybe one of them will help you strengthen your knowledge and better understand Git and version control.


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