Learning git

It seems many people here are very familiar with MATLAB, Octave and LaTeX but less so with git. In this page, we shall give a short overview of other sources that cover git or practical tools that can help you to ease your work with git. The materials are subdivided into different categories where the most relevant items are mentioned first.

Written material

• The Official documentation contains a lot of interesting materials and a lot of links like the ones below.
• Version Control by Example (Eric Sink) is ideal if you're new to version control. It covers more than git, but starts from the very basics.
• Pro Git by Scott Chacon is the git reference: it's a great read and it's free! Never go anywhere without it.
• GitHub help and GitHub guides cover git and how you should interact with it on GitHub in specific.

Video tutorials

While it's advised to read a tutorial at your own pace, sometimes it is just more convenient to watch a video that spoonfeeds you git.

• Git for ages 4 and up to learn to see how you can work with branches.
• Introduction to git with Scott Chacon from GitHub covers the basics, but also delves more into how everything is stored.

Tools

MATLAB Tools

• Since MATLAB R2014b, there is built-in git support in MATLAB.
• There is also quite some git tools available on the File Exchange:
  • Just a thin wrapper for the git command line: e.g. this one or another one
  • JGit for MATLAB is a Java-based (but entirely compatible) implementation of git

GUI Tools

Often it's easier to use a GUI to access git than fiddle with the command line. These don't always provide a full interface to the possibilities, but may make you more comfortable using git.

• SourceTree is a very good OS X & Windows client.
• SmartGitHg is a great crossplatform tool to access git, but unfortunately not free.
• On Windows, you can use TortoiseGit to integrate git into Windows explorer.

Command Line tools

• Auto-completion for git on the command line is a must-have