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Understanding Distributed Version Control Systems

by Mark Heath

Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS) such as Git and Mercurial have rapidly gained popularity over recent years. This course explains the basic principles behind DVCS, and explains the benefits of using them in a wide variety of common development scenarios.

What you'll learn

It's likely that you will already have heard of Distributed Version Control Systems such as Git, but what are they and how do they work? This course sets out to answer the questions of what is going on under the hood, and to demonstrate the new workflow you would need to learn if you started using it. We look at DVCS from the perspective of three different development scenarios - single developer projects, open source projects, and commercial projects. This course includes lots of diagrams that will help you understand the "DAG," which is the way DVCS store their history, and there are demos of using both Mercurial and Git. We also see how you can make use of repository hosting from sites such as BitBucket and GitHub.

Table of contents

About the author

Mark Heath is a software developer based in Southampton, England, working for NICE Systems as a software architect creating cloud based digital evidence management systems for the police. He is the creator of NAudio, an open source audio framework for .NET. He is passionate about continually improving his skills and training other developers, and in recent years has been particularly focused on the challenges of creating scalable and reliable Azure-deployed systems. In his (very limited) spare t... more

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