Git for Svners

Git, the currently popular versioning system is a pain to understand for people who come from CVS/Subversion, and are used to having just a central repo and local working directory.
Since Git is a distributed repository system, each developer has his own repository, that keeps track of local changes, as well as can sync with one or multiple remote repositories. Hence the concepts of Git are rather different from SVN, and the same terms like checkout mean different things in SVN and GIT. Being an SVNer earlier, i too found Git frustrating to start with.

Atlassian has a good tutorial that explains these concepts :
https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/learn-git-with-bitbucket-cloud

Some important concepts :

• The local repository is a full fledged repository, and  independently holds a history of its own branches, commits etc. One could create and work with a local repository, without ever connecting to a remote repository, say for some private work that is not shared.
• We usually start by cloning a remote repository to a local one. See clone. This creates a copy of the remote repository to the local, as well as adds a reference to the remote repository usually as "origin" to the local repo's list of remotes( See the remote command). Thus, when syncing with the original repository, we can specify it as "origin".
• The checkout command does NOT checkout files from remote. Instead it checks out the specified branch to the working directory. i.e. that branch now becomes the current one.
• GIT has a staging area where the changes to be committed are kept. We specify which files are to be staged by using the add command. Without adding, the commit command will have nothing to work on.
• When you push your changes to the remote, you are syncing changes committed in your local repo to the remote one. So you must have committed them first to your local repo. This may not be obvious to SVNers, who would expect the locally updated files to be automatically pushed !
•  TODO : See the branch command
• Unlike SVN, we do not need separate working folders for branches. We can switch to another branch in the same working folder, using the checkout command. This means that uncommitted changes can be lost, unless we stash them to a temp location.