Most of the books I review are advanced discussions for highly specific topics. “Github for Next Generation Coders” (Packt, 2024) by Igor Iric offers a completely different perspective, exploring GitHub approaches for elementary and high school users, those most likely in the 12-18 year old age. This is a book anyone should buy when introducing your children to coding practices. The book covers the basics and explores the cultural and collaboration methods required for successful modern coding practices throughout the software engineering industry. Numerous screenshots, step-by-step guides, quizzes, and a sample project to build are included.The first section starts with discussions on version control and using GitHub from either the command line or a browser with the UI model. This builds to collaboration, branching, and working with others to complete features. This part is excellent as many early academic programs focus only on the code and the IDE, not bothering to teach individuals how to share information, commit code, and protect multiple versions. Some excellent guides here suggest techniques for building pull requests and dealing with merge conflicts. These are all basic skills for the beginning coder and are explained excellently.With the basics explained, Iric delves into detailing the more advanced commands. The elements show building out a history and using diff commands to highlight what changed from one version or branch to another. These tools can save hours in finding problems or resolving difficulties. Also mentioned are additional tools like SourceTree, GitHub Desktop, and DevHub for ways to improve observability throughout a coding stream.Of course, building a clear understanding of code means understanding DevOps, and the associated pipelines. The fourth section describes building efficient actions, resuing pipelines, and creating valuable metrics. This early introduction also includes some excellent security practices for protecting a local codebase and using Dependabot functionality to keep production code from inheriting errors. As a security guy, I love this early emphasis on being practical with security and managing the basics. The section also mentions the benefits of the open-source community and how to find interesting projects.Finally, the book addresses the professional aspect, how to build out an effective GitHub profile, and use that to spark a coding career. Having a history a coding, samples of projects one has worked on, and individual projects are key steps in getting hired for the first time. The last bit introduces GitHub CoPilot, the GenAI solution to improve coding. I like leaving this till last, as I want young coders to learn first, and then build shortcuts rather than starting by cutting corners.One missing element might be an appendix with a learning plan, helping elementary teachers develop a path for their students in this area. It is not required, but if I was working with a class instead of an individual, I might want a wider scope of shared exercises or options to build functional examples. These additional steps from the Space Explorer project could just be code samples and not the whole book. It would be great to see classes launch their open-source projects as they learn GitHubOverall, “Github for Next Generation Coders” (Packt, 2024) is the perfect fit for any junior coder or for a parent looking for assistance in helping their junior coders. I’d go further and suggest the book also provides a potential text for teaching larger classes. Too many coding approaches focus on the language and the specifics without the basics of interaction, which has become GitHub for much of the industry. I thoroughly recommend the book for anyone looking to teach children or even those new to coding.

If you’re looking for an easily-read, comprehensive, and friendly introduction to GitHub, this is it. GitHub for Next-Generation Coders doesn’t only cover GitHub; git itself is explained in depth, and several adjunct packages like Sourcetree, GitHub Desktop, GitHub Codespaces, and DevHub are introduced as well. Each chapter has a quiz at the end and the answers are provided inline, so you don’t have to flip all over the place to confirm your responses. Lots of diagrams and explanations are provided throughout the book. There are tons of examples with analysis and the overall flow matches well with most project development paths.The writing style’s a little casual for my taste but a lot of readers may prefer it. I’d also like a few less “Imagine your … is like...” constructs but again, that is a question of style. Overall, though, this is a very complete and usable GitHub reference and I’d recommend it for anyone who’s new to Git or trying to bring up their existing skill set.

Arguably the most comprehensive and likely complete guide to getting GitHub work for you the way you need and should.Well, who knew in 2024, after working for so many years with SVN, CVS, TFS I would get a book to get to gripes with GitHub!Make no mistake - you may want a book.GitHub is more than just a code repository. It's an ecosystem!GitHub for Next-Generation Coders is just a one stop such book (my opinion, feel free to disproof).It taught me the not so obvious and obscure parts of GitHub I would never dare to explore on my own: Copilot, finding certain modifications in history, managing alerts, cherry-picking and more.Also it made me aware that there are tools at par with the expensive commercial offerings to manage GitHub effectively.As a near complete rookie in GitHub it is hard for me to say what could be improved in this book so I am obliged to give it a five star rating.