Learning Git

One thing that I've been realizing more and more recently is the importance of keeping up with advancements in developer tools. I'm a strong believer that if you aren't using the best tools available for the job you're doing, you aren't being as effective as you could be, regardless of how much effort you put in to it. Plus, as a lazy programmer I certainly don't want to put more effort in to something when a better tool could save me from that.

Up until recently, I'd only used CVS and Subversion for source control... CVS at work and a little in college, and Subversion at home because I knew it was more recent than CVS. As I started to pay more attention to what I was seeing around the web on blogs and Hacker News, I began to notice a lot of positive references to Git. It seemed a little intimidating to me, at first... largely command line based, with no full-featured shell integration like Tortoise for Windows? I didn't know about that... I like just right-clicking on files for diffs, commits, etc.

Tales of the wonders of branching in Git were probably what brought me around to finally try it out this weekend... well, that and GitHub, which is awesome. Anyway, on sitting down and starting to learn it I discovered that it really wasn't hard at all to pick up. A quick git init, git add . and git commit and I had a small existing project that I hadn't put in version control yet committed to a Git repository. And from there, pushing it to a repo on GitHub was incredibly easy as well. I then spent some time experimenting with branching and merging and all that fun stuff. I'll admit that I certainly still don't know all the intricacies of it, but the basic process was as easy and wonderful and rainbows as advertised.

One of the things I really love about Git is the fact that it uses a local repository in addition to a remote one (and that only if you want/need it to). Branches are such a great way of keeping logically separate units of work... well, separate, and that includes experimental changes. It's nice to be able to have experimental branches without them needing to be stored in the central repository that everyone on a project uses. Also great is the concept of the working directory, and how easily and quickly the files in it change as you change branches. Having one directory you can work from with all the different branches of your project has many advantages. I think I'll get in to that and some details of how I'm starting to make use of Git at work in my next post, which will probably be related to using Git locally with a central CVS repository.