Getting started

Git Cheat Sheet for Data Scientists

Photo by Roman Synkevych on Unsplash

Git is a free and open-source version control system. Most programmers and data scientists interact with git on a daily basis. So what is version control? Version control is a way that we as a programmer track our code changes and a way to collaborate with other programmers. This allows us to look back at all the changes we’ve made over time, which helps us to see when and what we did, as well as convert back to a previous version of the code if needed. You may have heard of Github before and may wonder what the difference is between Git and Github. It’s important to note that Git and Github are not the same. Github is a cloud-based hosting service that hosts and manages Git repositories, which expands upon Git’s basic functionality. Besides Github, there are many other services such as Bitbucket, GitLab, Codebase, Launchpad, etc. In this article, I’ll share some common Git Commands along with some comparisons and their use cases.

Basic Overview of how Git works:

1. Create a “repository” (project) with a git hosting tool (like Github)

git init

Make sure you are in a root folder of your project when you type git init , otherwise, git will track all the files on your computer and slow everything down. If you accidentally type git init in…