Sarah Guthals - GitHub For Dummies

GitHub For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Media and software compilation copyright 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019938575

ISBN 978-1-119-57267-1 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-57266-4 (ePDF); ISBN 978-1-119-57265-7 (epub)

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13
14. Chapter 14
15. Chapter 15
16. Chapter 16
17. Chapter 18
18. Chapter 19

Welcome to the world of collaborative coding! Whether youre just starting your coding journey, building fairly complex programs, or building with a team of people, this book guides you in using one of the most used tools for collaborative code-writing; GitHub.com. With more than 31 million users and over 100 million repositories (projects) hosted, GitHub.com is the No. 1 place to build and collaborate on code.

Though you spend many hours sitting at your computer, alone, debugging and writing code, the ideal coding team includes more than just you. Hundreds of developers spent more than four years building World of Warcraft before its first release in 2004. Although occasionally you can build a big hit like Flappy Bird alone, in a couple of days, the norm for software development is that you will work with other coders, designers, testers, user experience experts, product managers, and sometimes hardware engineers to bring something to the hands of users.

When youre first starting out on complex coding projects, understanding effective ways to collaborate can be daunting. This book introduces you to the world of open source development (the epitome of collaboration), as well as effective ways to work with one other person or even yourself over the course of many years! (I dont know about you, but Sarah from three years ago knows stuff that Sarah from today cant remember, and Sarah from today has more experience than Sarah from three years ago.)

GitHub For Dummies is written as a reference guide. Each part introduces you to a different aspect of collaborative coding. So if youre experienced in using GitHub, but youre new to the open source community, you can jump to and skip some of the GitHub basics.

As you explore each part of this book, keep the following points in mind:

• Words that are being defined appear in italic.
• Code and URLs (web addresses) are shown in monofont .
• Command sequences using onscreen menus use the command arrow. For example, when working in Scratch, you can open a new project as follows: From the menu bar, choose FileNew.
• The figures you see in this book use Mac and Chrome. We provide some tips when what you see on a Windows PC may be different, but you should see the same things, regardless of which Internet browser you use.

In this book, I make some assumptions that very well may be foolish, about you, your coding experience, and your goals.

• You're interested in and have had some experience with coding. You dont have to be an expert coder, but you have made a Hello World application (or the equivalent) in at least one programming language.
• You have patience and determination and are resourceful. When youre presented with a challenge, you can Google your way to finding a solution. This book guides you through GitHub.com as it exists at the time of writing it, but new features and workflows are being created, and part of your collaborative coding journey is to discover how to use those new features as they become available.
• You have experience with a keyboard and mouse on either Mac or Windows PC and have access to one of those machines.
• Youre capable of using an Internet browser, such as Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, and you can type a URL to access a website, such as GitHub.com.