Git and GitHub masterclass | Introduction to beginners [Lecture 1]

[0:01]Hi. Welcome to the Git and GitHub master class. This is the introductory lecture. We will be talking about the instructors of this course as well as the overall structure. So if you are starting to learn this course, we assume that you have heard of Git and GitHub, or maybe one of them. And you would like to learn how to use it. Maybe you have heard of that from your colleagues or friends or someone else. But you have no idea why it is useful, but you know that you have to learn it. If you are in this bucket, don't worry, most of the people who take this course are taking the course for the same reason, exact same reason. In fact, this is probably the third time we are recording this course by revamping the content. Because we realize that after conducting couple of webinars on this exact same topic, most of the people are actually not aware of the different functionalities of GitHub, or even the basic principles behind it. Most of them have just heard of it. If you are already familiar with Git or GitHub, of course, you will find some things trivial in this course. But I assure you, you will still end up learning a lot if you follow this course throughout. So, welcome to this course and this course will be conducted by the four of us, Dr. Raj Dandekar, Dr. Rajat Dandekar, Dr. Sreethath Panat myself and Abhijit Singh. We'll introduce you to our team in detail.

[1:35]So, as I mentioned, there is a huge crowd of people, every single one of them have heard of GitHub, but once you ask, start asking any serious question to any of them, you will realize that the people who actually know Git or GitHub or the people who actually use it on a daily basis to enhance their um, let's say, collaborative efforts or productivity, the number of such people are very low. And we have a singular mission with in this course, which is to take you from this left hand side bucket or group of left hand side people to the right hand side group of people. If you follow this master class throughout till the last lecture, and if you do all the assignments that are part of this course, I sincerely believe that you will be in a very, very good shape. And this is the team who is behind this course.

[2:38]I'll introduce you to each of them. So, Dr. Raj, Dr. Rajat and myself Dr. Sreedath, we are all colleagues for last many years and we were also friends since we were undergraduate students at IIT Madras. And Dr. Raj and myself finished our PhD from MIT in the US, and Dr. Rajat finished his PhD from Purdue University. We are also the co-founders of Vizuara and Abhijit is our colleague, who is a machine learning expert, who is an incredible expert at GitHub as well. So he was kind enough to create a good portion of this course and I'm sure you will learn a lot from him as well. So the four of us are behind creating this course as well as delivering it. And the course itself is divided into a few different chapters. I will come to that in a moment. But it will be great to discuss why you as a student or if you are an industry professional, why you should really care about this topic. Sometimes you are working on individual projects, maybe for hobby, or maybe for developing your profile. I was for sure working on individual hobby projects. Some of them were of the nature of coding was involved and many of the projects had no aspect of coding. And I have worked in small teams like maybe three members, I have worked in intermediate sized teams for startups. And I have seen from my experience that whether you are an individual or whether you are working as part of the team, at some point you will feel the need for having a system for taking care of, let's say, you are working on set of documents, taking care of the different versions of the document, taking care of somehow documenting all the different changes you make, you made in the past or taking care of the fact that you and your colleagues are making edits on the exact same same document at the same time. So all of this, how do you take care of this? Git or GitHub is the answer. So, whether you belong as an individual contributor in a big company, or you are just working on some hobby projects yourself, or if you are part of the team, you will inevitably end up using GitHub. Most of the companies, I would say almost all companies use GitHub, uh, in their teams.

[5:01]This is especially for coding related aspects, but in this lecture, you will see that, in fact, the usage of GitHub is not just restricted for coding, it's used in documenting the workflow, it's used for project management.

[5:18]It is used even sometimes in research paper writing, it's used for hosting websites and there are many, many other functionalities for GitHub. And what is Git and what is GitHub? What's the difference between these two? You will learn all of that as part of this course. And there is one more very important reason why you should care about GitHub. It is that, see, this screenshot was taken from my GitHub profile. What you see here is these uh, you see bunch of squares here? These squares are distributed over different weeks and over different months. I mean, over different days of the week over these many months. And I have highlighted the year 2023. And it clearly shows the days in which I have made certain contributions uh, to GitHub. And when I say contribution to GitHub, what I simply mean is, I made some changes. I pushed, I, I um, have a centralized GitHub repository where all my work is stored. And I made some changes to that work or to that project, so GitHub really keeps track of that. And if it's like bright green in color, it means I made maximum contribution around that time. If it is completely black or gray color, it means very less or even zero contribution. So GitHub really do keep track of your contributions and when you are creating a resume for a job application, you will most likely link your GitHub profile in your resume. And imagine your GitHub profile look something like this, where most of these squares are gray or black color and one, one or only a few squares are in green color. It, it does not make sense to the employer, right? Because they will expect you to have some experience using GitHub, based on what you mentioned in the CV or in the resume. But then when they look at your GitHub profile, it it literally looks like this. And do you really think, uh, they would want to hire someone like this? Because it's it's a little bit suspicious or it, it something does not add up. So, not knowing GitHub or not using GitHub, it can definitely hurt your job prospects or placement prospects if you are currently a student in a college. Especially while applying for roles that involve coding or or working in a team on on certain projects of that nature. So this is why it's extremely important to know GitHub, it's also extremely important to use it. And when you are part of a team, obviously you will end up learning it, but maybe in a painful way and this course will try to make it as seamless as possible for you. I took this image screenshot from this website programmerhumor.io, but basically, you know, you don't want your profile to look something like this, um, with mostly gray, a few of them in green. But rather, you would like, it's in your best interest if your profile looks something more like this. And why is that the case? Because this shows that you are a serious programmer or you are a serious person who, who organizes your projects in a way where you keep track of the changes you make, you keep track of all different versions of different files that are part of your project. And all of this is systematically done in your GitHub repositories. So it's very important that you appear very professional, even if you are good at coding, even if you are, you have the skills, you should show your ability to manage these documents in a very systematic manner.

[54:51]So in this particular lecture, we, we looked at the importance of Git or GitHub like at what point of your life, will you be using Git or GitHub? If you are a working professional or if you are a student who would like to work in a company or who is interested in doing internships, we discussed eight different projects, project cases in which you may, in some of which you may have to use Git, in some of which you, you will not have to use Git. We also discussed that Git and GitHub are two different things. Git is an online, Git is a version control system and GitHub is an online hosting service for GitHub. We also talked about GitHub desktop, which is a very easy way for using GitHub, and GitHub is an easy way for maintaining GitHub repositories online. And uh in the next part of the course, immediately we'll be covering Git in complete detail. So, Git is the basis for everything. So, I will recommend you to not skip anything from the Git uh, chapter. So this will be covered by uh, Dr. Raj Dandekar, So he'll be showing you uh, how to um, wrap your mind around the concept of Git, the concept of version control. And what does each Git command meaning mean? like there is push, commit, pull, create pull request, clone repository, fork repository. There are so many, so many commands. Uh, so we'll start from the very basics and you will, by the end of the, this part of the course, part two of the course, you will also be very proficient with certain advanced Git commands. Then after that, we'll be talking about GitHub in the third part of the course. And in this part Abhijit will walk us through uh, details of Git. He will also be covering certain Git commands, because uh, he'll show you how to operate Git hub using terminal and we'll start from the basics and move, we'll move till to the advanced part. And in the part four of the course, you will learn about GitHub desktop, which is a no code way of operating GitHub. And uh, I will be covering this part, my name is Dr. Sreedath. And uh you will learn different operations that you can perform in GitHub desktop, which is exact same as what you can perform using terminal in GitHub. And uh, we will also be taking a hands on example, so that you can understand very easily. Then part five and part six will cover a group of a collection of ideas. In part five, we will show you if you are a student or researcher or an industry professional, different use cases for where you might end up using GitHub. And how you can do that through some demonstrations. And this part will be split equally between all of us who are the instructors of the course. And part six also will be covered by all the instructors of the course. And in part six, we will talk we'll show you how to build and how to build and force websites on GitHub. How to use Git lab a little bit as I mentioned Git lab is a competitor of GitHub. We will show you a few different famous GitHub repository. And uh, we'll also show you continuous deployment, how to do that uh in uh in GitHub.

[58:16]And uh, we'll also teach you how to make open source contributions. We'll show you some example projects where you can actually contribute open in an open source way and put it all all on your resume. So, uh, please, welcome to this master class. And uh, I, I sincerely hope that you spend good enough time in learning all the concepts in this so that at the end of the day, as I mentioned at the beginning of this introduction lecture,