Stage 5 · Lesson 3 of 8

Small commits with clear messages

A good commit does one thing, and its says what changed and why. Start with a short summary line of about 50 characters, written as an instruction: "Add login rate limit", not "Added". Leave a blank line.

Then, if the reason is not obvious, add a few lines explaining why. Small, focused commits are easy to review, and easy to find or undo later. Some teams use Conventional Commits, which start messages with a prefix such as feat: for a feature or fix: for a bug fix. Follow the style of the you are in.

Common trapcommit messages like "update" or "final fix 2", which make history useless exactly when you need it.

A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come when you add the roadmap to your account. Add it

Resources for this stage

Start with· follow one of these

BookFree
Pro Git
Scott Chacon and Ben Straub
The free official Git book; chapters 2 and 3 cover everything in this stage properly
CourseFree
The Missing Semester of Your CS Education
MIT · Beginner
The version control lecture teaches Git from its data model upwards, which makes commands make sense

Practise

Learn Git Branching
Visual, interactive levels for branching, merging and rebasing where you see the graph change
GitHub Skills: Introduction to GitHub
A guided exercise inside a real repository: branch, commit and open a pull request

Keep handy

Oh Shit, Git!?!
Plain-English fixes for the most common Git mistakes, for when you panic
How to Write a Git Commit Message
The seven rules of a good commit message, with reasons for each

Also worth your time

roadmap.sh: Git and GitHubGo deeper
A map of Git and GitHub topics, from basics to hooks, submodules and Actions