How You Will Practice

Git is a program that runs on a computer, which raises a fair question: which computer?

In this course, two. That is deliberate, and it is worth a minute of explanation because it shapes everything that follows.

Here first

Most lessons give you a terminal on this page. It is a real one, running a real copy of Git on a real Linux machine. Nothing is simulated. You can ask which version is installed without creating or changing a project: git --version runs Git and asks for that one fact.

git --version

The terminal prints a version and changes nothing. The point is not to memorize the number; it is to feel the difference between reading about a tool and asking the tool a question.

The later practice runs in disposable workspaces here. You will meet each command at the moment it has a job, starting with an editor and your first repository in the next chapter.

You practice here first for one reason: here, mistakes cost nothing.

You will practice mistakes such as committing something half-finished and undoing an unwanted change. Each lesson explains the starting project and the recovery it teaches. Work within a chapter carries forward to its later lessons, so follow the steps in order and save your file before leaving the terminal. These practice files stay on the course machine; the commands do not change projects on your own computer.

That freedom matters more with Git than with most tools, because the fear of breaking something is the main reason people avoid learning it properly. They memorize four commands that seem safe and steer around everything else for years. Practicing somewhere consequence-free is how you skip that.

Then your own machine

Learning Git only inside a browser tab would be a poor outcome, because Git is not a website feature. It is a tool you install and use on the work you actually care about.

So the course does not end when the exercises do. Its final chapter walks you through getting Git onto your own computer, with directions for macOS, Windows and Linux, and names the few things that will look different there than they look here.

Some of that will be less smooth than the terminal on this page. Your machine has its own quirks, and meeting them with a guide beside you is much better than meeting them alone six months from now.

The aim is that when this course ends, Git is installed and working on your machine and you use it on your own projects. Not that you scored well on our exercises.

A terminal, and what you need to know about it

Some lessons ask you to type commands rather than click. If that is unfamiliar, it is genuinely fine.

You do not need to learn the terminal before starting. You need a small number of things, and this course teaches each one at the point it first matters, rather than in a chapter of background you would have to remember.

A terminal is a place to type an instruction and read the answer. That is the whole idea. It looks bare because it is old and because it never needed to look like anything else.

What is coming

The next chapter puts a project under Git for the first time. You will create a repository, make changes, and record your first commits, and you will finish it with a small history of your own to read.

Before that, one last time, the idea the whole course rests on: a commit is a snapshot with a reason attached, and a history is what you get when you keep them.