These days there are plenty of trendy ways to improve your programming skills and knowledge, including:

• Taking a free or paid online programming course
• Reading a programming book
• Picking a personal project and hacking away to learn as you code
• Following along with an online tutorial project
• Keeping up to date with relevant programming blogs

Each of these methods will appeal to different people, and each one has elements that will definitely make you a better programmer. If you are an intermediate or advanced coder, it is almost certain that you’ve tried each of these methods at least once.

However, there is another method that the vast majority of developers overlook, which is a shame in my opinion because it has so much to offer. This method is to learn by reading, analyzing, and understanding existing, high-quality codebases!

We are lucky to live in a time where good code is often accessible for free via high-quality, free-and-open-source (FOSS) projects. And it takes less than a minute to clone down copies of these codebases to our local machines from sites like GitHub or BitBucket.

Furthermore, modern version control systems like Git allow us to view the code at any point in its development history. Clearly there is a wealth of information right in front of our noses!

In this article, we will discuss the original version of Git’s code in order to highlight how reading existing code can help boost your coding skills.

We will cover why it’s worth learning about Git’s code, how to access Git’s code, and review some related C programming concepts.

We will provide an overview of Git’s original codebase structure and learn how Git’s core functionalities are implemented in code.

Finally, we will recommend some next steps for curious developers to continue learning from Git’s code and other projects.

Why Learn About Git’s Code?

Git’s codebase is an incredible resource for intermediate developers to further their programming knowledge and skills. Here are 7 reasons why it’s worth digging into Git’s code:

1. Git is probably the most popular software dev tool in use today. In short, if you’re a developer, you probably use Git. Learning how Git’s code works will give you a deeper understanding of an essential tool you work with every day.

2. Git is interesting! Git is a versatile tool that solves many interesting problems to allow developers to collaborate on code. As a curious human, I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about it.

3. Git’s code is written in the C programming language, which offers a great opportunity for developers to branch out into an important language they may not have used much before.

4. Git makes use of many important programming concepts, including content-addressable databases, file compression/inflation, hash functions, caching, and a simple data model. Git’s code illustrates how these concepts can be implemented in a real project.

5. Git’s code and design are elegant. It is a great example of a functional, minimalist codebase that accomplishes its goal in a clear, effective way.

6. Git’s initial commit is small in size – it is made up of only 10 files, containing less than 1,000 total lines of code. This is very small compared to most other projects and is very manageable to understand in a reasonable amount of time.

7. The code in Git’s initial commit can be compiled and executed successfully. This means you can play with and test the original version of Git’s code to see how it works.

Now, let’s take a look at how to access the original version of Git’s code.

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