4 Hour Training To Git And Github

I am publishing today The Four Hour to Git and GitHub Training. Is is available under the CC-BY-SA license to anyone who would like to organize a Git/GitHub training at work/school/user-group/etc.

Developers training on GIT @cticdakar par Thomas Sarlandie (@sarfata). With @peopleinput @seysoo @samaevent @afriqueitnews @esmt & others! — Yann Le Beux (@YannLeBeux)

Git is an awesome tool and I have not met a developer who went through the learning curve and regreted it. Combined with GitHub (or a similar service), it is even more helpful and everyone should learn how to use it.

I think in most developer groups (user-groups, companies, schools, etc) there is at least one developer who has some experience with Git. Taking the time to show to his/her fellows how to jump into Git is often the best way to get them started but most do not have the time to prepare a full training.

With those slides, available under the Creative Commons license, I hope that many developers will take the time to organize a small training for their friends and colleagues so that everyone joins the fun!

The full story

A few weeks ago, we organized a 5 nights training session for mobile developers in Senegal. We started with some jQuery Mobile to get everyone on the same base and then spent most of the time looking at everything else: ui/ux design, agile practices, testing and collaborative tools.

This last session on Git and GitHub turned out to be extremely successful and in just four hours I managed to get everyone in the room to learn the basic commands and start using GitHub.

The main exercise had them create a personal homepage on GitHub with GH Pages and then clone his/her left-neighbor’s homepage to add a link to his/her own page. We ended up with a ring (old-school!) of interconnected homepages for all the student. This was really fun.

I think we managed to show the best parts of git: useful locally to the developer, easy collaboration, free project sharing, and free web hosting through github (which is a big thing here in Senegal - There are not that many options to host pages for cheap when you do not have a credit card).

Of course we did not cover every concepts but they can learn the rest on Google.

The Four hour Git and GitHub training

Based on this first experience, I re-packaged those slides in a new slide-deck called “4 hour git and github training” that is available under the CC-BY-SA license. Anyone can use them to share some Git love with their co-workers, friends, etc. I tried them yesterday morning with a new group of 18 people and it worked great again!

So if you know just a bit about Git ad GitHub, please fork the slides, get some developers together and start sharing! Let’s put an end to zip files collaboration and source code lost due to disk problems!