Got 15 minutes and want to learn Git?

http://try.github.com/

by motowilliams • 14 years ago

510 171 14 years ago

try.github.com

An in-browser github tutorial powered by codeschool

skrebbel2• 14 years ago

I get an entirely blank page. JavaScript errors.

Win 7, Opera 12.

Toshio• 14 years ago

Pssst, Linux+Chromium.

skrebbel2• 14 years ago

Pssst, what?

taylorfausak2• 14 years ago

Right, because a good way to fix errors on a web page is to change your operating system and browser.

I am curious which JavaScript errors you're seeing, though, skrebbel. I don't see anything amiss in the developer console on Safari 5.1.7.

hack_edu2• 14 years ago

BTW, people aren't downvoting you because of your convictions as you seem to think according to your profile. They're downvoting you for a complete lack of contribution to the comment thread. That's why people downvote on Hacker News.

hhimanshu• 14 years ago

running too slow

Beltiras2• 14 years ago

Nice idea but far too basic. I need a Masterclass Git page.

tissarah2• 14 years ago

It looks like if you sign up there will be more classes?

Beltiras2• 14 years ago

When I went back to check I got this funky dialog that wanted permissions I was not comfortable granting. Too bad.

mikegirouard• 14 years ago

I'd love that too… I wonder what the demand is for something like that.

I did some programming training a while back and found that there seemed to be way more people interested in the basics. I'd be curious if something like Git would be different.

RutZap• 14 years ago

I guess it was intended to be basic. The idea behind it is that you take 15 minutes and do some basic things and if you like it then you can then learn more about it... I think it's a great starting point. It gives noobs like me a good interactive, hands-on start.

lucasgameiro2• 14 years ago

I think this kind of stuff always has focus on basic usage. Git has inumerous features and inumerous ways to do some of then. It's so much to put in this format. If you like it and need some more go and read http://git-scm.com/book ... I've learned a lot in this online book.

serbrech• 14 years ago

there are some more advanced stuff here, still not expert though : https://github.com/Gazler/githug

would be cool to actually run githug under that website :)

Gazler• 14 years ago

Define expert, I'll see what I can do!

fiveseven2• 14 years ago

@Beltiras - stay tuned to Code School in July, we might have something along those lines coming. ;)

taylorfausak2• 14 years ago

Very slick, but also very slow. Occasionally I have to run a command twice for it to register. Also, it's strange that git's output isn't colorized, considering the "Success!" messages are.

lucasgameiro2• 14 years ago

Totally agree

obtu2• 14 years ago

All the commands are implemented on the remote end (hence the latency), and some of them look like they are a limited node.js reimplementation (git is mostly the real deal, though the command list is whitelisted). I would be interested in a version that runs locally in JS/Linux.

juriga2• 14 years ago

This tutorial is very pretty and does a great job of emulating the local Git experience using just a single interactive webpage. However, Github seems to be trying to introduce Git to a wider audience - namely non-developers.

From the blog post[1]:

"If you know of a developer, designer, or other knowledge worker that would benefit from using Git but that hasn't made the leap just yet, send them over to try.github.com when they have a spare 15 minutes."

As a developer, it would be nice to know how well this tutorial really works for non-developers. To me, it seems that the tutorial introduces way too many concepts and details in a very short time for a non-developer to understand.

For example, there are a lot of people that work daily with a computer but freeze completely when faced with the task of using a command-line interface. Yes, clicking on the command does write it in the console but you still have to know to press the return key to actually execute the command.

I'm not saying people shouldn't learn Git, I'm just wondering what the target audience and purpose of this tutorial is.

[1] https://github.com/blog/1183-try-git-in-your-browser

stove• 14 years ago

Coming from someone who has very little command line experience, my experience with Git thus far has mainly been trial and error. Reading 10 Getting Started With Git blog posts is great, but there's always a part of me that knows some of the information I'm getting could be wrong or outdated. For me, this was a fast confirmation that the commands I've been using are correct and the workflow I've developed is 'valid'.

patched• 14 years ago

Many great points Jyri. This course certainly is not meant to be a completely detailed introduction. At Code School we're in the middle of working on something that should be more of a step by step introduction.

However, I think there's something to be said for showing people how they can be immediately productive with a tool before really understanding everything that's going on underneath. With just a few commands someone can start using git successfully, and that's all we were trying to communicate with this tutorial.

Stratego3• 14 years ago

It's hard to know how well it works for non-developers until we've had hundreds of non-developers going through the course. Which should hopefully be happening now.

I can't speak for GitHub (I'm from the Code School team that built this), but we were very cautious not to introduce too many concepts in that course (you can see below someone saying it's too basic, yes, that's the point), simply the absolute basics we thought people would need to know to understand Git. We also did our best to not introduce Unix concepts, which open another can of worms.

The point is that a very large amount of people working on and around the web today are terrified of the command line. There are plenty of tools that attempt to abstract away the Git command line interface, and our goal with Try Git was not to do that. To give people the real Git experience and try to ease them into it.

I'm sure we can improve it over time to ensure that fewer people "freeze" in front of a command line. You're right that we may need to be more explicit as to what people should do after entering a command, but we need to stay as consistent as possible with the actual command line.

Please feel free to give more feedback, I'll be going through everything that's posted here.

— Olivier Lacan

juriga2• 14 years ago

Hi Olivier, great to know you're actively improving the tutorial!

Now that I checked the tutorial again, there seems to be a "Press enter to submit commands" help text before the command prompt. If you just added that, great, since that would have been my first suggestion anyway :)

As a developer using Git daily I can only guess what the most problematic parts of this tutorial are for beginners. I hope you get a lot of good feedback and data from all the people visiting the site!

flatline3• 14 years ago

I have fairly extensive experience working with designers, and git is simply too complicated. The additional features offer them very little value, and the value they do offer is far outweighed by the complexity of the system and the propensity for difficult to resolve failure.

to3m2• 14 years ago

I rather agree. It seems difficult enough to teach people Alien Brain, SVN and Perforce, and they all have a much simpler model.

And is git much use to people who mainly work with large binary files? Well, I'm not sure (translation: "no") - but perhaps if they don't expect very much from their source control system, they won't be disappointed when git fails to deliver on its promises as well as it does for text.

tissarah2• 14 years ago

I really love the idea of sponsored courses/tutorials. This type of thing makes me more likely to use Git and GitHub more, and evangelize more.

I have a tough time wanting to pay for a course at a place like code school when I know if I go through the docs/tutorials I'll get it. It's not that I don't think the experience is better, or even (for a certain definition) worth the money. I feel like it is an unnecessary indulgence.

Stratego3• 14 years ago

This is beginner-level content, which makes a lot of sense as a free resource. We're working on a Code School "Git Real" course for the end of July that will go much further than this and be at an intermediate level, just like most of the courses we offer through a subscription or individual purchase.

I suggest you check out the first level of that course when it comes out. I doubt you'll think it's an unnecessary indulgence. In the meantime our Node course is good example: http://node.codeschool.com

msg• 14 years ago

It would be nice to get everything on one page. As it is, in my laptop I am scrolling up and down a lot to see the instructions, the terminal, and the local filesystem, which are laid out as three rows in one long column.

I did the tutorial mostly without looking at the filesystem so I could stop scrolling. But I know I missed a few helpful "extra" hints because they were below the fold next to the filesystem.

On the plus side, it piqued my interest. I've been meaning to get around to this.

pardner• 14 years ago

Nice tutorial.

However, it requires giving an app 'try-git' access to your private and public repositories... so afterwards, probably a good idea to edit your profile, click Applications, then remove the try_git app.

chmike• 14 years ago

I stoped when it asked to create a repo on github. This is not required to lean git. Well tried ;)

arms2• 14 years ago

Runs a bit slow, but impressive nonetheless. I appreciate the simple but effective interface.

I love when sites do something like this in order to give potential users a quick taste of a language or technology. I already learned Git using the Pro Git book, but this would have come in handy as an introductory lesson.

This also reminds me the of the awesome tryruby.org

robbiemitchell• 14 years ago

Something that often gets glossed over in explaining version control to a non-developer is, "WTF is happening with my files?"

The concept of a single folder containing multiple versions of your stuff is a big deal; the fact that you can't simply navigate to a branch as if it's a different folder--that you can't "see" all your files at once--is a non-trivial thing to punch through.

duopixel• 14 years ago

I really appreciate the new learning tools to become more adept at programming and the command line. However, I often find myself mindlessly re-typing the commands being thrown at me without really understanding what's going on, or why I'm being asked to do it.

I liked the approach of Ruby Monks where they give you a task and let you guess the syntax. If you got stuck you then look at the solution.

I don't mean to make less of try git, or any other interactive tutorial. We live in a wonderful time where we are able to learn powerful tools without even installing them, so I almost feel bad about making this criticism. But I think current tools could be improved by removing some of the wizardy feeling and allowing users to play around and trying to figure out stuff on their own.

Stratego3• 14 years ago

This is a great point. But before you can make people work at understanding something, you have to make them realize that they have a stake in trying to learn.

I don't think everyone (and certainly not myself) was able to understand the value of Git at first glance and decide to invest time and effort into learning about its inner workings.

Normal Code School courses and Ruby Monk challenges are made for people who already have somewhat of a vested interested in learning. Something that pushes them to challenge themselves beyond a simple demo/interactive tutorial. People like that are (sadly) a limited subset, we're trying to broaden that.

dpcan• 14 years ago

NOTE: This is not a rant, I'm just trying to give you a peek into my mind as I tried out this tutorial. I'm doing my best to describe my confusion.

I have no clue how to use Git, and I've been trying to wrap my head around it for a while. Unfortunately, this is yet another tutorial that is very frustrating even though it's designed to target noobs like myself.

So, I added octocat.txt to my staging area. Success! ... Wait. Why do I care? What did I do? Staging what, for what? Huh?

I committed some random text. Or something. And I typed "-m". So does "git commit -m 'something random'" actually do something? What did I commit to? Arrrggg. Why did I -m !?

Then there's this one: git commit -m 'Add all the octocat txt files'

So it understands plain English? Was that the random text? Is that just some sample text as part of the Tutorial or does that actually work on Git? Oh man, I'm now more confused than when I started.

...

Anyway, for some reason, everyone who tries to describe Git already has such a strong understanding of it and it's oddities, that they are, for some reason, unable to lay it out properly for a noob IMO. I cannot figure out how anyone figures out Git, I assume there was some serious hand holding, because I'm just not grasping it and I usually "get" this stuff rather quickly. Maybe that's the problem, Git isn't something you can just pick up quickly, maybe I need to buy a huge Git how-to book like the old days.

Sincerely, Frustrated in Programming Land.

arms2• 14 years ago

The tutorial definitely glosses over some information that you would need to research later on.

For a more in-depth guide, check out the Pro Git book @ http://git-scm.com/book. You can read it online for free.

to3m2• 14 years ago

The Pro Git book is relatively good. Ignore Chapter 1.

http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Basics

mmsear• 14 years ago

This is probably one of the easier tutorials out there.

lubos• 14 years ago

the best way to learn Git is simply to be forced to use it. and even then you only learn subset you actually need to get the job done but at least it's something to get you started.

I'm not going to post link to yet another git tutorial. I would rather recommend to start with something like Heroku, Appharbor or similar.

spacemanaki4• 14 years ago

> Maybe that's the problem, Git isn't something you can just pick up quickly

It is the problem, I think. Git isn't easy to use. It's a powerful tool designed by a very smart person (Linus) to manage a very complex project (the kernel). It's not a toy, and it's not designed for beginners. On top of that, the interface actually isn't that well designed, and is a pretty leaky abstraction layer that in many cases requires you to have some understanding of its internals [1]. But we're programmers, our work isn't always easy and the benefits of using Git or using any distributed version control system outweigh the alternatives (note that I'm not talking about Git vs Mercurial vs Darcs but rather about the previous generation of supposedly easier tools like SVN and CVS). So I really think it's worth struggling to master it and treat it like a first-class tool, that you're going to invest in because it's important, rather than try to find an easy way out.

I'm projecting on to you a little bit, and I apologize for that, but every time a Git tutorial hits the front page of HN, there are people expressing frustration or complaining that Git is too hard or too complex. Yeah, it's not perfect, but honestly, it's a damned good tool, and I think it's absolutely worth investing in. Most things worth learning are hard, and while that's not an excuse for poor tutorials (no comment on this one as I haven't tried it), I don't think programmers who take their profession seriously have much to excuse what seems like our almost constant desire for things to be easy.

Maybe the next generation of version control will be easier to use and have a more beautiful user interface, but Git is here now and there's an ecosystem around it supported by the network effects of its popularity, and I think that does end up outweighing the difficulty.

[1] That said, I think the inner core of its internals, ie representing revision history as a DAG of commits, is actually relatively simple, despite the poor interface. See this for what I think is one of the best intros to Git: http://ftp.newartisans.com/pub/git.from.bottom.up.pdf

mixmastamyk2• 14 years ago

Sounds like a false dilemma. Mercurial is here now, is powerful enough for a majority of users, is easy to use, and has an introductory book as well. After reading it and Spolsky's site, I picked it up in a few hours.

I think git is a good fit for people who find version control theory interesting, a endeavor in itself, or have complex workflows. For the rest of us, who simply need to work together (sometimes offline) with multiple synced backups, the complexity of git is too much.

Hg, for its flaws, keeps the simple things simple. I think the constant push from above to use git is a disservice, and I wonder if there will be a backlash at some point.

motowilliams• 14 years ago

There is also "Think Like a Git" (http://think-like-a-git.net/), "The Git Cheatsheet" (http://ndpsoftware.com/git-cheatsheet.html) and "Git, the simple guide" (http://rogerdudler.github.com/git-guide/). This might just be piling on to your 'yet another tutorial' list but maybe one of these will help it click for you.

weavejester2• 14 years ago

In a nutshell... a project can be described in terms of the changes a user makes over time.

In Git, these changes are called "commits".

Commits contain a change a user has made to the code and some additional useful metadata. This metadata includes the time the change was made, the user's name, a message to describe in general terms what the change was (that -m thing), and so on.

Git itself is a database that stores these commits. Each commit links back to the change before it, forming a chain.

If a single person is working on a project, this may be a linear chain of commits, but if multiple people are working on the same project, two people might make a change to the same text at the same time.

So maybe one person writes "The Nexus 7 costs £159", and another person writes "The Nexus 7 costs $199". If this happened, the chain would split; you'd have two valid changes made to the same text. The act of reconciling these chains is called a "merge". We might choose to use one version or the other, or to combine the two, such as "The Nexus 7 costs $199 (£159)".

That's basically it. The only other thing Git does is to allow you to give commits a human-readable name so you can refer back to them later.

hack_edu2• 14 years ago

Again, this is a gross oversimplification that describes only generic version control concepts and none of the powerful features that .

Go ahead and try explaining a rebase without trying to broach the concepts of time travel. How about why having a local copy of all commits/branches/etc related to the repository is helpful, or even at all possible, without relating it to a simpler client/server version control system.

kevinqi• 14 years ago

It sounds like the problem isn't git itself, but the concept of source control in general, which is pretty abstract until you actually dig into a source-controlled project that has other people committing - after that, the understanding comes pretty naturally.

zxtang• 14 years ago

I liked http://gitref.org when I started with git. I find it's a good quick reference to common git commands so you can quickly get up and running with git. The rest of learning git is really just practice and searching for how to do stuff when you need to.

The section on commit explains what the '-m' option is:http://gitref.org/basic/#commit

krmmalik• 14 years ago

I know how you feel. I was working on a very basic project and since i had some hand-holding i used git to publish the code to github, but now the hand-holding has stopped (my mentor doesnt have time to help me) and i'm no longer pushing to Github (dont want to make all my code open source).

It was too much of a learning curve to figure out how to deal with this change where Git was concerned, so i went back to mercurial which has a windows client and is easy enough to get my head round.

I do think that Git is probably more powerful as i see it in much more use in production out there, and at a guess i imagine that for version control it's probably more dependable and reliable than Mercurial - im not really qualified to say - but right now, i'm sticking to mercurial because at least i can wrap my head around it, and that's what matters, for now.

kilemensi• 14 years ago

Of all the basic version control intros/books, for me nothing beats Version Control by Example[1] book. It first explains the core concepts/commands behind version control such as create, commit, etc and them it goes on to illustrate how these commands actually implemented and used in practice using different version control systems.

The explanation is given for both centralized version control systems, using SVN, as well as for distributed version control systems, using Mercurial and Git (and Veracity).

Give it a try. The digital editions (PDF/EPUB/MOBI) are free for download I think.

[1] http://www.ericsink.com/vcbe/

chrismealy• 14 years ago

You're right. I'm halfway from git noob to power user. My problem with git is that everything is named badly. index, staging, head, ref, reset, rebase, pull, fetch, merge, all of it could have been named better. The commands could have better arguments. And you're right about most tutorials. They only make sense if you already know git.

These are pretty good. It's when I saw these that I realized everything in git is named poorly:

http://marklodato.github.com/visual-git-guide/index-en.html http://ndpsoftware.com/git-cheatsheet.html

nhebb• 14 years ago

I'm about half way through the Git Immersion tutorials [1], and so far it's been pretty good - clear explanations of what you're doing and why you should care.

[1] http://gitimmersion.com

corford• 14 years ago

+1 for this. Of all the tutorials I've tried, this was the one that sunk in the most.

rajat• 14 years ago

I sympathize. What is really necessary are not tutorials on how to use Git--it isn't that hard, after all, for most of us--but more of a description of actual workflow. Not HOW you issue Git commands; but how to use Git.

It would be interesting to read articles about how a single programmer uses Git, how a small programming team, how a distributed team uses Git. Similar articles about how a team producing art, or text (not programmers) use Git.

There's plenty of Git command tutorials already; let's hear about how you actually use Git.

dsirijus2• 14 years ago

Agreed. And not only for Git. For basically anything else in programming land you get to have either hands on quick guides or spec listing. There's serious shortage of good, moderately abstract, short overviews of what something actually does and how it does it.

Take Vim for instance. When I first got to it, I found only resources that are paraphrased with "this command does that. that command does that... nth command does that". Now, if only someone described buffers, tabs and windows to me (like in an article that was recently linked to here on HN), or told me that commands can be described as acronyms of verbs and nouns etc. I'd be much more proficient with Vim now.

For Node.js, I found some talks/presentations from its creator that really hit this spot.

I still haven't found anything like that for Git.

v33ra• 14 years ago

Sometime back, I wrote about my initial Git workflow: http://veerasundar.com/blog/2011/06/git-tutorial-my-git-work...

RollAHardSix• 14 years ago

Correction, what we need is both. Tutorials and a description of the workflow. The articles are all nice touches as-well. Knowing how my team could be more organized helps me want to try it out.

And just in-case I came across as an asshole, I liked your post and thought it was great :)

kalid3• 14 years ago

I completely agree. If it helps, I wrote up some visual tutorials about version control in general that many have found helpful:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/intro-to-distributed-ver...

The idea is to build a mental model about what is possible vs. memorizing a bunch of specific commands. Once I wrapped my head around the concepts, the commands fell into place.

philwelch9• 14 years ago

I figured out Git, and I'm not that clever, so don't worry!

The staging area (aka the index) is where you put things before they become a commit. You don't always want to commit all of your changes at once. The index is there so you can commit the changes you want instead of just committing all the changes every time.

`git commit` means "turn the contents of the index into a commit". A commit is a set of changes that logically go together denoting a version of the repository. A commit needs to have a message describing what the commit does. If you just type "git commit", it opens up an editor for you to type in your commit message. If you want to skip the editor, you can just pass in the -m flag, followed by your commit message in quotes.

Are you familiar with the shell? Are you comfortable with the concept of a linked list? If not, work on those--even if you don't use Git, it's part of being a better programmer. But if you do understand these things, you can fairly easily get a very deep understanding of Git.

UnoriginalGuy2• 14 years ago

Unfortunately you fell right into the trap he said everyone trying to explain Git does. The first paragraph is complete nonsense unless you already understand it.

You first call it a staging area and then you clarify with an "index," but you never clarify what an index is?! The second paragraph doesn't improve the situation much.

Ultimately I think there is a language breakdown here. People who explain Git seem to be unable to do so without using Git-language, and it is very difficult to understand the Git-language without understanding how it is used.

So therefore it is a chicken/egg problem. You somehow need to know the language to understand Git, but to understand the Git you need to understand the language.

PS - I know you're trying to help; it is just one of those things where I am not even sure it can be explained in that way.

CrLf2• 14 years ago

That doesn't explain the fundamental part. Why is there a staging area in the first place?

Place yourself in the shoes of a subversion user, the workflow is very simple and intuitive given that:

  1. the repository is a (remote) place where my project is stored
  2. the local copy is where I modify my project

Then, a commit is just pushing your modifications to the repository where other people can go get them.

Now, with git you don't have a remote repository. Your local copy is itself a repository. Think about this for a second. Then...

If a commit doesn't push my changes to a remote repository, why do I care?

Well, if a commit allows me to have a local history of changes that I may not want to have in the remote repository, why do I need to stage my changes? Why don't I just commit them and be done with that? Isn't the files themselves a stagind area? Isn't this all redundant?

These are the problems a non-Git user faces. Why do I care about this complexity? In what whay does this make the process of making my changes accessible to others easier?

Answer: it doesn't.

Regular people are usually perfectly happy with their other VCS solutions. The ones that want them to see the light and start using Git for all its benefits must thing about what makes Git useful and explain that.

It doesn't matter that Git is important for large distributed projects. Most people aren't a part of large distributed projects.

No tutorial that I can remember does this. Not a single one.

vrishabh2• 14 years ago

I can empathize, been in a similar situation myself. Most of the git tutorials out there have a problem that they don't explain much of the 'why' and just tell about the 'how'. They are telling mostly about commands and not about the concepts behind it.

Some guy at Harvard wrote a great tutorial[1] on understanding git conceptually. It has been on of the best git tutorials I have read myself.

[1] Understand Git Conceptually - http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cduan/technical/git/

mbq• 14 years ago

Yeah, it should certainly start with some intro explaining the idea of VC and defining words like commit or repo.

mixmastamyk2• 14 years ago

The svn book, (and I believe the hg) spends a number of chapters explaining how version control works. It will also give you some background on how things were, and where they're going. If the git docs don't do a good enough job, I suggest you read/skim the introductory chapters of these two free books.

js2• 14 years ago

See if the git parable helps:

Git is a simple, but extremely powerful system. Most people try to teach Git by demonstrating a few dozen commands and then yelling “tadaaaaa.” I believe this method is flawed. Such a treatment may leave you with the ability to use Git to perform simple tasks, but the Git commands will still feel like magical incantations. Doing anything out of the ordinary will be terrifying. Until you understand the concepts upon which Git is built, you’ll feel like a stranger in a foreign land.

The following parable will take you on a journey through the creation of a Git-like system from the ground up. Understanding the concepts presented here will be the most valuable thing you can do to prepare yourself to harness the full power of Git. The concepts themselves are quite simple, but allow for an amazing wealth of functionality to spring into existence. Read this parable all the way through and you should have very little trouble mastering the various Git commands and wielding the awesome power that Git makes available to you.

http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.htm...

thetabyte• 14 years ago

I find by far the best way to learn git is actually walking through it with someone who knows, and asking absolutely every question that comes to your mind--force them to break it down. Email me at mrjordangoldstein@gmail.com if you want to set up a Skype chat/screenshare sometime, I'd love to teach you. It wasn't that much long ago I was in your shoes!

P.S. And the only way to get better with it after you learn is to use it everywhere. Which is a good idea anyway, because version control is incredibly useful.

petercooper• 14 years ago

This is a common problem in teaching, technical writing, and other forms of technical instruction.

Even when a good teacher or writer sets out to deliver material to total beginners, it's very tricky to truly enter the beginner's mindset and cast away a lot of the mental abstractions built up over the years.

I think one way to improve this situation is to focus on results and casually use features and techniques along the way rather than focus on features and techniques and have contrived examples to show off them off. The fewer technical terms or domain specific language you can use up front, the better. (I should note I've been very guilty of the contrived example approach, but this is what it's all about.. experimenting and learning what really works for learners :-))

FrojoS• 14 years ago

Yes, exactly! You have to start with examples. Real problems and then suggest solutions. Too many teachers, I'd say the majority, start from the abstract explanation and only bring in the example in the end -if at all.

obtu2• 14 years ago

This isn't necessarily a problem. I can learn by immersion.

Good teaching shouldn't introduce too many concepts at one time, but giving incremental goals that require interacting with a few related concepts is ideal. Tediously spelling out all the details is good for a spec, but would hurt interest and motivation.

adambard• 14 years ago

Off-topic from the theme of your post, if you really want to learn about git, you could take the path that I did, which was to go by way of Mercurial (otherwise known as hg).

Hg is simpler than git in many ways. There's no "staging" for changes, so "commit" is just taking a snapshot of your files as they are right now. Simple.

And, since it's so simple, that means that you can write a really good tutorial for it, which Joel Spolsky did: http://hginit.com/01.html

Hg is plenty useful in its own right, and it doesn't really deserve to be training wheels for git as I've presented it here. But moving from hg to git is really easy; it makes git just seem like hg with a bunch more features.

raygunomical• 14 years ago

It's pretty clear that this tutorial expects you to already have some experience with concepts in revision control. However, the problem is that if you're already experienced in revision control, you would probably find this tutorial a little simplistic and condescending.

Basically, git has a steep learning curve and people haven't found a good way to flatten it out a bit.

opminion• 14 years ago

Perhaps what's missing in Git is a good metaphor.

splicer2• 14 years ago

Rather than these n00b tutorials, I recommend reading "Pro Git" by Scott Chacon, available for free here: http://git-scm.com/book

If you prefer a video, try "Getting Git" by Scott Chacon: http://vimeo.com/14629850

Coming from a Subversion & Perforce background, I was initially very confused by Git. There were two things that finally switched-on the old lightbulb for me:

a) Scott's book

b) Actively using Git for all of my personal projects (e.g. small school assignments and code experiments), without using a remote repository. If you defer learning about remote repositories for now, I'm sure the light will switch-on for you as well :)

Domenic_S2• 14 years ago

b) glosses over what I've found to be one of the biggest brain-twisters in git - working with remotes.

acesubido• 14 years ago

> Anyway, for some reason, everyone who tries to describe Git already has such a strong understanding of it and it's oddities, that they are, for some reason, unable to lay it out properly for a noob IMO

I for one had a really hard time grasping Git, until I wiped my VC-mindset slate clean, it was primarily my upbringing in a development environment where Centralized Version Control was the king. I read up on Eric Sink's Version Control By Example. It's a great book to lay-out the fundamentals of Git. If you wrap yourself around the concept and not the tool, the use of tools (Git commandlines, Git GUI's) will come naturally.

nollidge• 14 years ago

This is the best intro I've read to get the concepts of distributed version control: http://hginit.com/

It's specific to Mercurial, but git is very similar. If it's the overall concepts that are giving you trouble, that should be effective in removing those blocks.

usea2• 14 years ago

The tutorial guides you through using some git commands, but it doesn't let you deviate. It encouraged me to make up commit messages, but when I look at the log it apparently ignored my messages and used some other ones. If it's not going to represent the actual experience using git, why bother? It serves only to confuse.

p2e2• 14 years ago

I agree. I kept trying to "ls" and observe what was going on between each command or examine the directory structure of /.git and so on. Only later did I realize that there was a filesystem explorer-like window below.

Also, having them automatically adding files to the directory was kind of confusing. Sometimes I would type a command and something new would appear in the file system as a result of that command. Other times, I would type a command and something new would appear in the filesystem that I suppose was expected to be used for a subsequent step. It would have been nice if these things would have happened in isolation from each other. That way I could run the command, see what happened, and then perhaps click "next" to move onto a different scenario with a new set of files I could add to the repository.

yashchandra• 14 years ago

I just did this and it was cool. But, if you are a complete beginner to version control in general, it may not be simple to follow. It tries to explain a few things such as creating a branch, checking out etc. but for a complete beginner, this tutorial will be a little bit difficult. Kudos for web based interactive learning though!!

lambtron• 14 years ago

As someone without a trained programming background and never once used any version control (last time I programmed was for the ti-83 in middle school), Git at first was tough to pick up.

It wasn't until I went through Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial that I actually learned Github, master/branches, etc., and understood what are commits and pushes.

p2e2• 14 years ago

As someone new to git, I was dissapointed to see that:

    git add "*.txt"

added all of the .txt files from the current directory AND all of the .txt files contained within a subdirectory. I would have expected the same files to get added as those that would have shown up using:

    ls *.txt

For other new users: I've been told that this is an error in the tutorial. The tutorial forced the use of quotes but apparently they are not required and git would have added only the files that show up with the ls command as indicated above.

EDIT: I'm wrong. Using quotation marks DOES make git fetch .txt files within subdirectories. As pointed out by cellularmitosis, git seems to do it's own "interesting" glob expansion.

cellularmitosis• 14 years ago

for those who aren't familiar with the nitty gritty, what's happening here is that bash (your shell) expands the "glob" (* .txt) before it ever runs ls, so what actually gets run isn't 'ls * .txt', it's 'ls foo.txt bar.txt dog.txt' etc.

but when you put quotes around "* .txt", that tells bash not to expand the glob.

so in the above case, '* .txt' is actually getting passed into git, rather than 'foo.txt bar.txt dog.txt' etc. I'm not a git user, but it sounds like git has special handling for "* .txt" which causes it to perform its own glob expansion, which happens to also include descending into directories. hilarity ensues.

EDIT: I can't seem to figure out how to type * .txt without triggering the italicized formatter, so I had to put a space after the asterisk. urgh.

Sindacious• 14 years ago

It had you use `git add '* .txt'` because there were untracked txt files in the octofamily directory. `git add * .txt` would have just added the txt files in the root of the directory and ignored the octofamily directory.

I wouldn't think this is so much an error as they _want_ you to use '*.txt' to add the files in the subdirectory along with the files in the root. They could have touched better on the difference between quotes and no quotes though.

kristopolous• 14 years ago

Nice Find! I added it to my git-themed twitter account here: https://twitter.com/#!/gitHater

Let me explain what's happening.

What you are looking at is actually part-git, part unix-shell-y.

You did ls * .txt

Let's try something way crazy, type echo * .txt

What do you see? All of your txt files right? But that's just echo, not ls.

Ahh. Here's the clinch. When you do " * ", that's called either shell "expansion" or "globbing" depending on your shell. Basically, the shell says "ok, before I run your command, I'm going to look at it and see if I need to do anything on my end"

This is why you can do

   $ n=0
   $ echo $n

The shell hijacks your input, replacing "$n" with "0", then feeds it into echo

In your example, the shell has hijacked the star in "ls * .txt", replaced it with all of your txt files, say (a.txt, b.txt) and then ran ls.

That means that ls ACTUALLY got

   ls a.txt b.txt

And THAT's why it works with echo.

---------

So git add "* .txt" works differently, what gives?

Well, when you put things in double or single quotes you are telling the shell "hey, don't do your usual stuff here". The single quotes are more extreme. If we go back to our n=0 example we can try two more things:

   $ n=0
   $ echo $n
   $ echo "$n"
   $ echo '$n'

As you can see, the ' says "relax shell, I have this".

So when you do

    git add "* .txt"

you are actually passing the "* .txt" to git.

In most reasonable, sensible programs, the program will look for a file named "asterisk dot t x t" in this case.

But alas, our friends at git have decided to be tricky. The ' * ' syntax for git is similar to gitignore-like syntax (http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/v1.7.10/giti...)

"Awesome", you exclaim! Not so fast. It's not the same.

So git add '!1' doesn't work. git add 'one/ * * ' doesn't work, only git add ' * ' seems to work.

Why is it so hard? Good question! I haven't any idea. But we can commiserate together ... you know, over twitter.

Have a good one!

thyrsus• 14 years ago

I tried varying my commit messages from those recommended, (e.g., in the second commit, I typed 'git commit -m "Commit all the things!"'), and the commit messages weren't reflected in the "git log" output. It's not clear to me now how much of this is canned response and how much actually runs git.

tdonaghe4• 14 years ago

The tutorial seems broken for me.

I'm at the point where you do a git checkout clean_up and then nothing at all happens. You just get the prompt back. If I try git status same thing.

I've reloaded the page multiple times, but same problem.

Maybe Code School needs to work out a few more bugs?

tsurantino• 14 years ago

Does this straight up just not work for anyone? I am typing in commands and am getting no feedback. Just getting a new $ line.

Kilimanjaro• 14 years ago

Nop working here either. OSX Lion, Safari + no plugins + no java + adblock just in case.

lwm• 14 years ago

Yup, its completely dead...

tdonaghe4• 14 years ago

I'm having the same problem. Other people are complaining about this in their support forums.

Doesn't speak too highly of Code School in general.

fiveseven2• 14 years ago

@tdonaghe - we have fixed all the lag issues (in less than 15m no less). So not sure 20 minutes of sub-optimal experience justifies your comment. Hope you stick around to learn more! :)

tdonaghe4• 14 years ago

Link to their support forum's topic on this:

http://help.codeschool.com/discussions/code-school/3731-try-...

UnoriginalGuy2• 14 years ago

This doesn't help you learn Git. It helps you learn the commands for Git if you're already familiar with version control.

I can kind of sort of use Git already but frankly I don't understand what half of the commands do nor do I understand the point of them.

Technically the only commands I would assume you need are:

- Get repository - Merge repository (with comment) - Get history/comments

But Git has dozens of different things it can do that expand on the above and learning it all is time consuming and there is no one single place to do so (and no the documentation isn't a good place because it isn't a intuitive way to learn).

The biggest hurdle of using Git is that Git has its own vocabulary for things; and there is nothing "common sense" about that vocabulary. Even people who attempt to explain it assume you know another version control so use vocabulary from that.

forrestthewoods2• 14 years ago

Can we please stop pretending that Git is simple and easy to learn? If that were true then there wouldn't be "Learn how to use Git in <X> minutes!" posts every other day.

The fact of the matter is that Git is incredibly powerful but also complex and hard to learn. This isn't a bash on Git at all. It's ok! Sometimes complicated things are just that, complicated.

I believe we'll have better guides and tutorials if people stop treating Git like it's easier or more simple than it actually is.

envex• 14 years ago

Learning everything about git is hard, but learning enough git to use personally isn't that hard.

I use git personally to keep backups of my code and deploy sites I work on. I dont' work with other developers so my knowledge of git is workable, but probably super small.

Git gets complicated (but probably extremely useful) when working with bigger groups and tons of commits, branches and merges.

wonnage• 14 years ago

I feel like there's not much point in any sort of VCS lesson if it doesn't go over the more complex areas though. For example, reverting commits and resetting to earlier points in history are pretty essential actions, but both have their subtleties in Git (e.g why reverting a merge is hard, what 'reset' vs 'checkout' do) that will bite you if you don't know what you're doing. And everyone's fucked up via git rebase at least once.

If you never need to merge, revert, or in general use any of the aspects of Git that make it special then it's totally reasonable to use something simpler like built-in OS versioning or a conceptually simpler VCS like SVN. But I guess there's no reason why Github would sponsor that, right?

vgurgov• 14 years ago

There are a lot of cases even on bigger SW projects when for some roles(designers, tech writers) just basic git skills would save a lot of nerves to developers.

Designers can fix small things, like images, tweak html a bit etc. They dont need to know how to create/merge new branches etc..

I dont see that Git is trying to pretend that its simple but i can see how that interactive tutorial can be incredible useful to a lot of people.

joering2• 14 years ago

its great that Git wants to explain what it got to offer to me, but why on step #7 it is mandatory to create a new account??

this killed entire positive experience, in my view.

amix• 14 years ago

I haven't read any books or longer tutorials on Git. I find it easy to use and if I run into trouble I just Google after help (which happens a few times a week). Throughout the day I mostly use 9 Git commands. Here are the top 9 commands I use:

    git checkout X
    git checkout -b new-branch
    git commit
    git add; git mv; git rm; 
    git pull --rebase
    git rebase origin/master
    git push origin X

I have used this for a long time without running into huge amounts of trouble (and if I need to revert back to a specific or do anything special I can always consult Google). The bottom line is: For simple cases Git is really simple to use and to learn. You don't need to become a Git master to use Git.

The problem is that people introduce the powerful features of Git that only a few percentage of people will ever use.

forrestthewoods2• 14 years ago

Everything you just said is exactly why Git is not simple and can not be learned in 15 minutes. Just by operating from the command line you've already left the realm of "simple" in my opinion. Having to learn 9 commands is not simple. Having to hit Google for help multiple times per week is not simple.

I strongly, strongly disagree with your assertion that "for simple cases Git is really simple to use and to learn". I've watched many programmers, artists, and designers who have used source control struggle with Git from day 1. I'm sorry, it's just not simple and if it were this topic wouldn't come up over and over and over.

Again, I say none of this as a slight to Git. Complicated things are complicated. That's ok, but pretending they aren't isn't helpful.

base698• 14 years ago

Reading through the comments here is infuriating, and it's no wonder people don't git what the big deal is.</lame>

With git you can share you current work to any arbitrary remote branch. The implications are your half baked feature can get pushed up and your coworker can do a checkout on the new remote branch. If they have suggestions they can make a change which you can cherry-pick off their branch into your branch. Also, you can branch off your current working branch, rebase master and merge their new branch in and push that up to master when everything works as expected. Try that workflow without breaking the central repo effecting everyone else's work in SVN.

radnor• 14 years ago

I used to be like you. I didn't understand git and had no real reason to - I was used to using things like TFS and Vault just fine at work. Then a friend of mine got a job with Github and I suddenly had a reason to care about git. Once I had a reason to learn I found it much easier to understand and use, and now I've even started using tfs-git at work for fun.

So if you find git is hard or confusing just become friends with someone at github. ;)

phleet• 14 years ago

Pro Git does a really good job of explaining everything you need to know about git without trying to do it really quickly.

After reading it, I have a much better understand of git, and can work myself (and others) out of pretty much any oh-my-god-I-destroyed-everything problem I run across. You haven't broken stuff for real until you need to use git reflog.

Link to book, free to read online: http://git-scm.com/book/

hcarvalhoalves• 14 years ago

I'm with you. Git is powerful but in terms of user interface it's a complete train wreck. It doesn't need more guides or tutorials as much as it needs a sane command line and help messages. There's space for a Git fork, or a higher level "porcelain", as Linus himself calls it.

gpmcadam• 14 years ago

Complex is not the same as complicated. Git is complex, but not complicated.

lloeki• 14 years ago

Git makes me think of Go (the board game), Rule 30 and Rule 110 cellular automata and Conway's Game of Life: a few simple defining rules that can be explain in a minute, but incredibly rich behavior follows.

maayank• 14 years ago

Your comment reminded me of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4201044 (I posted it after reading your comment), that impishly hints at what you say.

Peaker• 14 years ago

Git is a very simple and powerful system covered by a hideous and complicated CLI. The simplicity is simply hidden.

kentbrew• 14 years ago

This was working nicely until about step 20, where everything sort of hung. I've deleted cookies, removed the repository, and tried to restart but I am now hung on step 1. (By "hung," I mean: I've issued the command but nothing ever comes back.)

conradfr• 14 years ago

My use of Git is basically to have a dev branch where I commit randomly, like some sort of ftp/backup, and a master branch that I merge from dev if I have a release ready.

The other day I tried to merge only some files from a new "experimental" branch and failed hard. I then realized I had it all wrong about how to successfully commit and manage branches.

And felt so lame :) The sad part is that I am the only one trying to use a CVS at work.

TL;DR : I still need to learn Git, so thank you everyone trying to "teach" it.

EricDeb• 14 years ago

As someone who has never used git I found this tutorial relatively acceptable. I was disappointed there was not a level 2!

gaoshan• 14 years ago

Basic Git is easy. This intro is basic. Just be aware that it can get much more complicated and the answers to how to do it may or may not be readily available via Google.

This guide is like starting the "Couch to 5K" fitness program but knowing that, if you stick with it, eventually you will have to compete in a marathon.

ojjop• 14 years ago

Does not work with Opera.

azarias• 14 years ago

Pff...this command line doesn't even know 'ls' :)

jbarham• 14 years ago

Git: the cargo cult SCM. Too much unnecessary voodoo. Given the choice I'd take Mercurial any day.

gburt• 14 years ago

This is basically a glorified animation. On the commit stages, try adding a different message than theirs. When you get to the log stage, it shows their messages. :-(

Inetgate• 14 years ago

That page is broken. The try.github.com will redirect to http://try.github.com/levels/1/challenges/1 but I got "We're sorry, but something went wrong. (500 Internal Server Error)"

mikescar• 14 years ago

git: 'clone' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

What? I don't know if this is allowed later and everything is sandboxed.

krollew• 14 years ago

Nice, but I think it's far too few. Stuff that this tutorial could be handled with tar as well. I'm not sure if it would encourage to use git somebody who doesn't know much about version control. Somebody who know, probably don't need it because commands like "git log", "git add" and "git commit" are quite obvious for someone who used SVN or other version control system.

basicallydan• 14 years ago

Git _isn't_ easy to learn. Not at all. You can't spend 15 minutes looking at a Git tutorial or playing a game which teaches you Git, close the page and exclaim "Excellent! I know Git now!" - you can however put it on your CV, and blag it in that new job you're applying for where you need to understand git.

Like most things in software development, learning by doing is the best option because most people don't have photographic memories, and having a reference is usually essential.

Luckily, we all have one huge reference available to us, for free (more or less), with a thriving community who are more than happy to help: The Internet.

This tool is, nonetheless, a good starting point.

shasty• 14 years ago

no i dont have 15 minutes

grannyg00se• 14 years ago

A lot of these Git tutorials seem to walk you through a series of commands as if knowing the commands is knowing Git.

I think they should focus on scenarios instead. Short stories like: "Bob's code is working well but he wants to try something that might be completely misguided. He knows better than to mess with his working code....." Then at the end of the story a command is introduced. Also, some kind of indication of what Git is actually doing when you issue that command. When you tell Git to branch, what actually happens to the file system? When you say git status, what is it actually looking at?

And please, don't start a tutorial on Git without introducing the three area paradigm (working, staging/index, commit)

Here's a talk by Scott Chacon of GitHub. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDR433b0HJY

It's over an hour long and very detailed.

dbalatero• 14 years ago

One bit of feedback: it's hard to notice that the Advice box has changed every time you advance a level. Can that be made more obvious? (here's what I'm talking about: http://cl.ly/251P3i2t1k1p3C3U0D0u)

florestan• 14 years ago

I seem to have great problems with this tutorial. And not that it actually does not help me with why and how I should use it in different scenarios (wich it doesn't), but my entire computer crashed for the first time. Got a major error, lots of blinking on the screen and the had to reboot several times. When I tried open it again, chrome crashed every single time. Not impressed.

Got 15 minutes and want to learn Git?

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