Git in Practice

Chapter 1. Local Git

This chapter covers

• Why Git was created
• Creating a new local Git repository
• Committing files into a Git repository
• Viewing the history of a Git repository
• Using gitk/GitX to visualize the history of a Git repository
• Viewing the differences between Git commits

In this chapter, you’ll learn how and why to use Git as a local version control system. Let’s start by learning why Git is so widely used by programmers.

1.1. Why do programmers use Git?

Git was created by a programmer to be used by programmers. Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, started writing Git in 2005 with the goal of having a distributed, open-source, high-performance, and hard-to-corrupt version control system for the Linux kernel project ...