Learn Git by building and examining real local repositories rather than memorizing isolated commands. This course contains 20 hands-on labs arranged as 10 guided-lab and challenge pairs, giving you instruction first and a short opportunity to apply each skill on your own.
You will move from repository initialization and identity settings through staging and branching, then into history editing, stashes, tags, log analysis, comparisons, and recovery. The progression starts gently, while later challenges ask you to combine beginner concepts in intermediate tasks.
What You Will Learn
By completing this course, you will learn to:
- Initialize a Git repository, inspect its status, stage files, commit changes, and read its history.
- Configure global and repository-specific identity, display, editor, line-ending, and alias settings.
- Manage tracked and ignored files, review staged and unstaged changes, and unstage safely.
- Create, switch, merge, and remove branches as a project evolves.
- Amend and revert commits, cherry-pick selected work, and use interactive rebase to refine history.
- Save work in progress with multiple stashes, reapply it, and create a branch from a stash.
- Create, inspect, check out, and delete lightweight and annotated tags.
- Filter and format logs, compare repository states with
git diff, and recover work with reset and reflog.
Who This Course Is For
This course is for new developers, technical learners, and anyone who wants a practical foundation in local Git workflows. It is also useful if you know a few Git commands but are not yet comfortable deciding what to stage, how branches and history relate, or how to recover from mistakes.
Prerequisites: No previous Git experience is required. You should be able to navigate directories, create or edit simple text files, and run commands in a Linux terminal.
Learning environment: All 20 labs run in provided Ubuntu 22.04 desktop environments and focus on local repositories in the terminal. No GitHub account or external hosting service is required for the listed activities.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do the guided labs and challenges work together?
Each of the 10 topics has a detailed guided lab followed by a shorter challenge on the same skill. The later challenges are marked Intermediate because they require more independent application, even though the course starts at beginner level.
Does this course cover GitHub, remote repositories, or pull requests?
No. The listed curriculum focuses on local Git repositories and does not include remote collaboration workflows. It prepares the command-line foundation you will need before learning GitHub-specific tasks.
Will I practice undoing mistakes without risking my own projects?
Yes. Reset, reflog, revert, and history-rewriting exercises run in disposable course repositories. This lets you compare recovery methods while learning that operations such as hard reset and interactive rebase require care in real shared work.
Is this only a basic commands course?
It begins with fundamentals, then reaches stashes, annotated tags, log filtering, branch comparisons, cherry-picking, interactive rebasing, and reflog-based recovery. The scope is substantial, but remains centered on local Git rather than team hosting platforms.
