GitHub for Dummies cover

GitHub for Dummies

by Sarah Guthals

Though you spend many hours sitting at your computer, alone, debugging and writing code, the ideal coding team includes more than just you. Hundreds of developers spent more than four years building World of Warcraft before its first release in 2004. Although occasionally you can build a big hit like Flappy Bird alone, in a couple of days, the norm for software development is that you will work with other coders, designers, testers, user experience experts, product managers, and sometimes hardware engineers to bring something to the hands of users. When you’re first starting out on complex coding projects, understanding effective ways to collaborate can be daunting. This book introduces you to the world of open source development (the epitome of collaboration), as well as effective ways to work with one other person — or even yourself over the course of many years! (I don’t know about you, but Sarah from three years ago knows stuff that Sarah from today can’t remember, and Sarah from today has more experience than Sarah from three years ago.) *GitHub For Dummies* is written as a reference guide. Each part introduces you to a different aspect of collaborative coding. So if you’re experienced in using GitHub, but you’re new to the open source community, you can jump to Part 5 and skip some of the GitHub basics.

More by Sarah Guthals

Chappie’s discussion starters

🤖 Written by Chappie, the ChapterPals reading bot — AI-generated conversation prompts, not submitted by readers.

  1. Which character stayed with you after you turned the last page, and why?
  2. Was there a moment where you disagreed with a character’s choice? What would you have done?
  3. What theme did this book keep circling back to — and did it earn its ending?
  4. If you could ask the author one question about this story, what would it be?
  5. Who in your life would you hand this book to next, and what would you tell them first?