References: Branches as parallel work surfaces

Primary sources

Pro Git by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub. Chapter 3 section 3.1 (Branches in a Nutshell) and section 3.2 (Basic Branching and Merging). Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

Read online at git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Branches-in-a-Nutshell and git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Basic-Branching-and-Merging.

Pro Git’s Chapter 3.1 has the canonical diagrams of branches as pointers. The diagrams in this lesson are influenced by Pro Git’s framing.

Secondary sources

Atlassian Git Tutorials, specifically the “Branching” section at atlassian.com/git/tutorials/using-branches. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia.

Atlassian’s “Comparing Workflows” article (atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows) is a useful second voice on when to branch and how teams structure branch usage.

Git documentation on git branch at git-scm.com/docs/git-branch and on git switch at git-scm.com/docs/git-switch. The authoritative references for every flag.

Further reading

For a deeper understanding of git’s branch internals: Pro Git Chapter 10 section 10.3 (Git References) explains the .git/refs/heads/ directory and how branch pointers literally exist on disk.

For the “git switch vs git checkout” history: the GitHub blog post introducing git switch and git restore covers why git 2.23 added these commands and what they replaced.

For branch naming conventions: the Atlassian article on branch naming covers common patterns and the rationale behind them.

What this lesson does not cite

L5 does not yet cite GitHub Flow, GitFlow, Trunk-based Development, or any specific team workflow. These are L9 territory. L5 covers the primitive (branches); the workflows that USE branches come later.

L5 also does not cite branch protection rules or CI-gated branches. Those are L9.

License of this lesson

This lesson is part of the Clawdemy curriculum, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Share Alike 4.0 International. Pro Git’s CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and Clawdemy’s CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license are directly aligned (the 4.0 license is an approved compatible adaptation license for 3.0 source material per the 3.0 license’s later-versions provision). Commercial use is licensed separately at /legal/licensing.