Version Control with Git, 3rd Edition

Part III. Intermediate Skills

In Part III, we prepare you with the intermediate skills that are necessary when working with Git repositories. We begin this part of the book with a discussion about commits and conclude by introducing you to the concept of remote repositories before sharing some good practices for managing your repositories.

The history of your repository consists of commits, and at times, you might need to modify the commit history for valid reasons. Before you can alter commits, you will need to know how to find them. In Chapter 8, we’ll teach you how to find specific commits and their metadata. Then, in Chapter 9, we’ll share various techniques for altering commits, some of them destructive and others nondestructive to your repository’s history. Bear in mind that the skills you learn in this chapter are not limited to operations that are strictly scoped to altering commits; they can also help you in your quest to debug or understand how changes came to be in your repositories. Moving on, in Chapter 10 we’ll discuss how you can stash and unstash temporary changes to your work, and we’ll discuss the reflog, which keeps a record of supported operations on every ref or commit you introduce.

Finally, in Chapter 11, we will help you understand how best to collaborate and share changes when working with multiple people who need access to your repository. We will also provide some guidance on how to publish your repository and set up a good structure for ...