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Philip Perry
Philip Perry

Posted on • Originally published at programming-decoded.com on

How I improved my git skills

Knowing how to use git for version control is a very important skill every software developer needs to have. I’ve been using git for a while, but I decided that I needed to get a better understanding of how it works and how to use it.

I learn best by trying things out, so I specifically looked for interactive courses. As I wanted to learn as much as possible, I used 3 websites:

https://learngitbranching.js.org/

“Learn Git Branching” is a very neat website that is not only interactive, but also comes with great visual representations of how a git branch looks like. After every lesson, one can try out to solve a problem oneself directly in the browser.

https://lab.github.com/

Github is almost a synonym of Git, so it’s worth learning how to use the Github features. The courses “Introduction to GitHub” and “Managing merge conflicts” are both interactive and create an actual test repository right inside your Github account for you to practice with.

https://www.katacoda.com/courses/git

This Katacoda course is also free and browser-based and helped me review and understand better various concepts.

http://gitimmersion.com/

I haven’t actually taken the Git Immersion course, but I’m linking it here so that I can find it if I decide to review again how to use Git at a later point.

Apart from going through these courses, I also decided to simulate some things for myself by setting up a second GitHub account. For setting things up locally on my Mac I followed this article: How to manage multiple GitHub accounts on a single machine with SSH keys.

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