Head First Git

Chapter 2. Branching Out: Multiple Trains of Thought

You can walk and chew gum at the same time. Git old-timers will tell you, as they recline in their lawn chairs (sipping their handcrafted green tea), that one of Git’s biggest selling points is the ease with which you can create branches. Perhaps you have been assigned a new feature, and while you are working on it, your manager asks you to fix a bug in production. Or maybe you just got around to putting the finishing touches on your latest change, but inspiration has struck and you’ve just thought of a better way of implementing it. Branches allow you to work on multiple, completely disconnected pieces of work on the same codebase at the same time, independently of one another. Let’s see how!

It all started with an email

Norm was completely immersed—his fingers flew frantically all over the keyboard, code appeared at a breathtaking pace on his screen, and everything just worked. He felt like Neo in the Matrix—he was the system, and the system was just an extension of him. He was so close to finishing up a complex change to the codebase that he could almost taste it.

Norm knew he wasn’t done yet. But he committed his code anyway, and he started to tackle the bug. At the end of a long day, when he knew he had fixed that ...