The Simple Git Course

By Nick Manning (@seenickcode).

Welcome to my very simple course on Git.

If you are completely new to software engineering, this course is for you.

This is a self-paced course offering detailed written lessons with accompanying videos. In the videos, I cover the examples in the written lessons, step by step and also explain concepts in further detail.

Why This Course is Different

1. It’s for people who are completely new to software engineering.
2. Accompanying video walk-throughs are in easy to understand, clear English.
3. Concise but comprehensive, focusing on key skills you will need often.

What We’ll Cover

1. Introduction: what is Git, installation and configuration
2. Versioning: creating repositories, files, commits
3. Branching: creating branches, merging, dealing with merge conflicts
4. Publishing: intro to GitHub, cloning, creating remote repositories, pushing code
5. Collaborating: pull requests, forking, merging pull requests

Contributions Welcome

By the way, I respond to all feedback and requests for new content. If you'd also like to report inaccuracies, misspellings, grammar mistakes, content that could be explained more clearly, topics I may have not covered yet, etc, words of encouragement, I would greatly appreciate it.

Your Instructor

First, a bit about me. My name is Nick Manning (@seenickcode). I’m from New York, currently residing in Boston and have been a software engineer since 2001. My professional credentials can be found here: linkedin.com/in/nicholasmanning. While I've worked at some large companies, I have also co-founded a number of startups, working mainly with social, cross-platform mobile first products. This means that I incorporate my experience working on all types of projects and teams into my course content.

I love the social aspect of connecting with users, building new ideas and having them evolve by wearing many different hats (product, design, engineering). This is why I’ve created this document, with full commenting access to you.

As for a few personal details about me: I am a proud father of two. I play classical violin, I enjoy learning new languages (Arabic, Russian, Italian, German), love to travel, cook and go backpacking in the little free time that I have nowadays. I’m obsessed with building products and teaching in my free time.

Motivation

There are many courses on Git out there. Why create yet another one?

I was basically not satisfied with what was available to newcomers to programming. I noticed that many other courses are overly complex, have many distractions including ads, up-sells, marketing overload or try to pull you into monthly plans to take other courses you probably will never need, causing an endless cycle of hopping from one course to another without deeply learning anything.

Here are some reasons on I feel simplegitcourse.com stands out:

1. It’s a minimalist course.
   Most websites that offer Git courses are either too terse or too overwhelming, in my opinion. Especially course websites that overload you with unknown instructors, up-sells, distractions, emails, laundry-lists of skills most of which you will rarely or never use.
2. Easy to understand English with content in text and video form.
   I focus on breaking down concepts to approachable bits, explained in clear and easy to understand English. English is not a super strong language for most students and I offer video walkthroughs to my written content.
3. I pull from over 20 years of experience to provide concise, effective lessons.
   While most of the content in this course is very fundamental, in my videos I strive to provide some insight as to what skills you will most certainly end up needing vs what you can skip over for the foreseeable future.
4. Non-linear content
   I will soon offer quizzes to test your knowledge, gamification, social features, certifications, etc. I can do this because I create courses using custom software that I build for the community.
5. Provide feedback and instantly engage with an instructor.
   I strive to make sure that at all times, students feel encouraged to submit feedback, ask questions and instantly engage with instructors (myself at the moment) without feeling like they need to go it alone and only reach out to forums to ask questions, only to get poor quality answers from other junior engineers.

Intended Audience

This course is for new software engineers who want to learn the basics of Git and a bit of GitHub.com features so that they can work on a team easily and without any handholding.

Requirements

No existing experience as a software engineer is required.

As for hardware and software, all you will need is a computer with either macOS, Windows, or Linux installed and optionally a free Github.com account.

With that, let’s get started. I thrive off of feedback so please, let me know how I can improve the course and I will take action to do so!

Time Investment

Watching the course videos end to end and pausing to follow along, trying examples yourself will take about 2 hours.