Baby Git Guidebook for Developers

Book excerpt: The Baby-Git Guidebook for Developers is intended to accompany the Baby-Git project created by Jacob Stopak. Baby-Git refers to the very first version of the Git codebase written by Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux) in 2005. Baby-Git is written in the C programming language and consists of about 1,000 lines of code and a total of 7 commands, and they actually work. The simplicity and "smallness" of the code make Baby-Git the perfect codebase for curious developers to study in order to learn how the code works. The fact that arguably the most popular and important tool for collaborative software development in the history of the coding world is simple enough for a novice developer to understand directly from its initial code is really an amazing thing. This guidebook makes the learning experience even easier, by delving into Git's original C code in detail to help developers learn what makes Git tick.