Pragmatic Version Control Using Git

3.4 Using and Understanding Branches

Branches are a way to maintain alternate histories of the project you’re working on, like we talked about in Section 1.7, ​Creating Alternate Histories with Branches​. Alternate histories are great, but how do we use them in a real project?

The honest answer is “any way you want.” For our purposes, though, we’ll narrow it down a bit. Two types of branches are useful: different versions of a project in different branches and topic branches that deal with a specific feature. In this section, we’ll talk about the first kind of branches.

Your mysite code is almost ready to be released, but it still needs to be signed off on by everyone involved. In the meantime, you can start working on the new features in ...