What are the fastest, most practical resources to learn GitHub by actually using it?

[damn9757]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Learning Paths

Body

I’ve been trying to learn GitHub, but honestly, most of the long YouTube tutorials I find are hard to stay focused on. I’d much rather learn by actually using GitHub instead of sitting through hours of someone explaining every little thing.

I’m looking for short, practical, beginner-friendly resources where I can learn GitHub by doing things myself.

I’d especially like to know:

• What resources are best for learning GitHub from scratch?
• Which GitHub concepts should I learn first?
• What can I safely skip for now?
• Are there any good interactive websites, short tutorials, hands-on projects, or documentation you’d recommend?
• What’s the fastest way to get comfortable with repositories, commits, branches, pull requests, issues, and contributing to open-source projects?

Basically, I want a hands-on learning path that gets me comfortable with GitHub quickly, without spending days watching tutorials.

[antonisloukis]

Hey, I’d skip the long GitHub tutorials and just make a small throwaway repo and practice the actual workflow.

Start with the basics: clone -> make a change -> git add -> git commit -> git push. Then create a branch, make another change, push it, and open a pull request back into main. After that, try creating an issue, linking it to a PR, resolving a merge conflict, and maybe forking another repo.
GitHub Skills is pretty good for this because the exercises happen inside real repositories instead of just being videos.

If you can comfortably use commits, branches, pull requests, issues, forks, and basic merge conflict resolution, you already have most of what you’ll use day to day.

[madhav9757]

thx for advise ...

[damn9757]

thx @antonisloukis it seems great advise, ik basics of the github as i watch videos but i wanna get a real experience of branch management , workflows and interacting a project flow through disscussion

[aaron-ACY]

I’d skip the long GitHub tutorials and learn by building a small “throwaway” repo.

Start with the basic workflow:

clone → make a change → git add → git commit → git push

Then practice:

branch → make another change → push → open a pull request → merge

Once that feels comfortable, add Issues, forks, and a simple merge conflict to the exercise.

GitHub Skills is probably the best resource for this style of learning because the exercises happen inside real GitHub repositories rather than just being videos.

I’d focus on these concepts first:

• repositories
• commits
• branches
• pull requests
• issues
• forks
• clone/push/pull
• basic merge conflicts

You can safely ignore things like rebasing, cherry-picking, Git internals, Actions, submodules, and other advanced features for now.

After that, pick a small open-source project and look for good first issue or documentation fixes. Making one real PR will probably teach you more than watching another 3-hour tutorial.

The goal isn’t to “finish learning GitHub” — it’s to repeat the workflow until it becomes muscle memory.

[damn9757]

Yeah… but the problem is, it’s honestly hard to find a good open-source project these days where you can properly learn contribution workflows, PRs, code reviews, and branch management by actually working on real issues.