Introducing GitHub: A Non-Technical Guide

by Peter Bell, Brent Beer

Overview

If you’re new to GitHub, this concise book shows you just what you need to get started and no more. It’s perfect for project and product managers, stakeholders, and other team members who want to collaborate on a development project—whether it’s to review and comment on work in progress or to contribute specific changes. It’s also great for developers just learning GitHub.

GitHub has rapidly become the default platform for software development, but it’s also ideal for other text-based documents, from contracts to screenplays. This hands-on book shows you how to use GitHub’s web interface to view projects and collaborate effectively with your team.

• Learn how and why people use GitHub to collaborate
• View the status of a project—recent changes, outstanding work, and historic changes
• Create and edit files through GitHub without learning Git
• Suggest changes to projects you don’t have permission to edit directly
• Use tools like issues, pull requests, and branches to specify and collaborate on changes
• Create a new GitHub repository to control who has access to your project

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781491949740
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	12/06/2014
Pages:	139
Sales rank:	1,047,923
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Peter Bell is a contract member of the GitHub training team, the founder and CTO of speakgeek.co and develops curriculum and provides enterprise training on a range of technical topics including lean product development, NoSQL data stores and devOps. He has presented at a range of conferences including DLD conference, ooPSLA, QCon NY, QCon SF, RubyNation, SpringOne2GX, Code Generation, Practical Product Lines, the British Computer Society Software Practices Advancement conference, GraphConnect, DevNexus, cf.Objective(), CF United, Scotch on the Rocks, WebDU, WebManiacs, UberConf, the Rich Web Experience and the No Fluff Just Stuff Enterprise Java tour. He has been published in IEEE Software, Dr. Dobbs, IBM developerWorks, Information Week, Methods & Tools, Mashed Code, the Open Source Journal, NFJS the Magazine and GroovyMag.

Brent Beer has used Git and GitHub for over five years through university classes, contributions to open source projects, and professionally as a web developer. He now enjoys his role teaching the world to use Git and GitHub to their full potential as a member of the GitHub Training team.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

1 Introduction 1

What Is Git? 1

What Is GitHub? 1

Why Use Git? 1

Why Use GitHub? 2

Key Concepts 3

2 Viewing 7

Introducing the Project Page 7

Viewing the README.md File 8

Viewing the Commit History 9

Viewing Pull Requests 11

Viewing Issues 13

Viewing the Pulse 15

Viewing GitHub Graphs 16

The Contributors Graph 17

The Commits Graph 18

The Code Frequency Graph 19

The Punch Card Graph 20

The Network Graph 21

The Members List 22

The Traffic Graph 23

3 Editing 25

Contributing via a Fork 25

Adding a File 26

Creating a Pull Request 28

Editing a File 36

Renaming or Moving a File 39

Working with Folders 41

Creating a Folder 41

Renaming a Folder 41

The Limits of Editing on GitHub 42

4 Collaboration 43

Committing to a Branch 43

Creating a Pull Request from a Branch 46

Collaborating on Pull Requests 48

Involving People with Pull Requests 49

Reviewing Pull Requests 49

Commenting on Pull Requests 49

Adding Color to Comments 50

Contributing to Pull Requests 51

Testing a Pull Request 53

Merging a Pull Request 54

Who Should Merge a Pull Request? 55

Pull Request Notifications 55

Best Practices for Pull Requests 56

Issues 56

Creating a New Issue 57

Managing Milestones for Issues 58

Managing Labels for Issues 60

Commenting on Issues 61

Referencing Issues in a Commit 61

Best Practices for Issues 62

Wikis 62

Getting Started with a Wiki 62

Adding and Linking to a Page on Your Wiki 65

GitHub Pages 66

Creating a Website for Your Project 66

Creating a Website for Yourself or Your Organization 69

5 Creating and Configuring 71

Creating a Repository 71

Adding Collaborators 76

Configuring a Repository 77

Integrating with Other Systems 79

Personal Versus Organizational 85

Creating an Organization 86

Managing Teams 87

6 Downloading 93

Why Clone a Repository? 93

GitHub for Mac 94

Making a Commit Using GitHub for Mac 103

Viewing Changes in GitHub for Mac 106

GitHub for Windows 109

Making a Commit Using GitHub for Windows 116

Configuring Command-Line Tools in GitHub for Windows 118

7 Next Steps 121

Index 123