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Development Tools Git Basics Getting Started With Git Committing Changes

Lucas Pendley
Lucas Pendley
21,113 Points

Anyone else finding this course unnecessarily hard?

I wish Treehouse would see the problems that students are having with this course and edit it. The instructor is not very clear on which buttons he is pressing and it's very difficult trying to find the answers when a simple, "I hit X, Y." would suffice.

I'm honestly so lost haha. I feel like the basic details for someone just learning are skipped over.

4 Answers

Andrew Breslin
Andrew Breslin
10,177 Points

Yes, it is hard. The instructor could make it much easier by taking a few seconds to tell you exactly what he is typing and by not moving so fast through screens that he has seen a million times, but that we newbies do not understand because this is all very very new to us.

In his defense though: this is a course on git and not on mastering the basic console functionality. He is assuming you already know that so he's skipping over all of that. I would recommend going through the console basics course at least two or three times before you even attempt this. That's what makes this so hard. We are all so used to more complex interfaces where you can move a cursor around with a mouse and whatnot.

One thing that had me stumped was on the committing changes lesson. He added a message: "added a readme file" And then he did did something and a screen appeared for a small fraction of a second and then was replaced by another a screen, and then the instructor said "we see a success message letting us know that the commit has been added to the repository"

But I didn't see that . . . not the first time. Because I hit "return" after typing "added a readme file" and that did nothing.

What you need to do is hit ctrl-x (exiting nano) and then hit enter to say yes to the "Save modified buffer?" question that appears (again, for a fraction of a second in the tutorial). The instructor didn't explain this. He just did it in under a second and said nothing about what he was doing there. It would have been nice if he explained it but he didn't, because he assumes you've already mastered console basics.

Again, I really think the incredible frustrations I and others are having with this course stems largely from the fact that you absolutely have to be pretty familiar with the console functionality, and that's just so foreign compared to most other coding lessons. The console course is challenging, but it starts to make sense if you go through it a few times and this course is all but impossible without a thorough familiarity with the console.

I might go back to the console course again before moving forward with this one. But good luck.m

Andrew Breslin
Andrew Breslin
10,177 Points

edit: after you hit ctrl x you have to hit 'y' first in response to 'save modified buffer' and then you have to hit enter after that to accept the default file name. Again, this happens in a split second in the tutorial. People familiar with the console probably do this without even thinking about it.

Becky Steele
Becky Steele
16,229 Points

Hi Lucas! Git definitely a challenging subject to "git"... see what I did there?

Anyway, I highly recommend supplementing your learning after you're done with Git Basics by walking through this short, super easy, interactive tutorial by Github: https://try.github.io/

We recommend it to our students, and I thought you might find it useful! Take care, and happy coding!

George Nono
George Nono
11,256 Points

Honestly everything in life is easy - when taught the right way. I must admit I found my self staring at the screen and saying to my self "What the f is this guy saying".

I have been quite frustrated as well, try doing the swift 2.0 course it's mind boggling how they jump from one point of data to the other, i think they need to make sure all the steps are clear (i mean they spent a whole tutorial convincing us that version control was, we know we're here to learn it!)