Getting Started with Git - Git Recipes - page 2

• Branching
• Data integrity
• Locality
• Distributed system
• Open source
• Last but not least—popularity
The branching model is git's most amazing feature. I consider it alone to be a suffi-
cient reason to switch to git. With git, branches can be created almost instantaneously
and can be easily merged and shared with other developers. Although there are many
sophisticated operations that can be performed on branches, the basic usage is easy and
straightforward. This encourages the extensive usage of branches, and I think I am not
exaggerating when I say that the git branching model changed the way developers
work.
Data integrity means that git tracks all the files and directories of your project in
such a way that it is not possible to introduce unnoticed changes. Even if you want to
change a single byte you have to create a revision. When you create a revision, there is
no way to hide something inside. This is a built-in feature that cannot be turned off.
Therefore you can trust git completely: all the changes are introduced as revisions and
every revision can be inspected.
Locality increases git's efficiency and allows you to execute many git commands
even if the network is down. When you work with git you are not connected to any
server. Most commands, such as commit, branch, merge, and rebase are performed loc-
ally in a similar way to typical filesystem commads such as mkdir, ls, rm. They don't
carry out any data transfer.
Because git is a distributed version control system, every repository is fully func-
tional and can serve both as a sender and a receiver. If there is a channel of communic-
ation between the computers, their repositories can exchange the contents in both direc-
tions. Therefore, you can create more complicated workflows than just the client/server
paradigm that are used by centralized revision control systems.
Added to this is the fact that git is an open-source project and it is becoming the
most popular version control system on the world—you'll see that there is good reason
to start learning git.