GitHub Learning Lab is an initiative launched earlier this year to help people of all skill levels use GitHub. GitHub has released four new courses, Uploading to GitHub, Migrating to GitHub, Community Starter Kit, and Introduction to HTML. These complement the existing courses: Introduction to GitHub, Communicating using Markdown, Managing Merge Conflicts, and GitHub Pages.
Uploading to GitHub is designed to help users upload a local project to GitHub. In this course, users will learn how code is stored, create important Git files like .gitignore, identify important steps to manage repositories, and get involved with the community.
Users who want to migrate their repositories to GitHub can enroll in the Migrating to GitHub course. This course helps users migrate a project using GitHub's importer tool, discussing important steps for preparing and sharing a project along the way. Users will learn how to prepare a project for a successful migration, handle any binary files currently stored in a project, and import a project to GitHub.
The GitHub community has adopted some informal standards to find and contribute to a project, and the Community Starter Kit aims to teach many of them, including how to add metadata to help potential contributors find a project, and tips for building a healthy, welcoming community.
Introduction to HTML is the first non-GitHub focused course, designed to help users build a clean webpage using HTML, demonstrating how users can use GitHub Pages to host their websites for free, as well as how to use foundational HTML concepts (tags, headers, lists, images, links) and publish a page using GitHub Pages.
Introduction to GitHub is a short course, where users will learn how to communicate in issues, manage notifications, create branches, make commits and introduce changes with pull requests.
Communicating using Markdown helps users create and use headings, organize thoughts in bulleted lists, use checklists to show how much work has been done, add lists, images, links, and determine where and how to use Markdown in a GitHub repository.
Managing Merge Conflicts aims to guide users through the steps of finding the best merge conflict solution. In this course, users will learn how merging happens and what causes merge conflicts, and address simple and complex merge conflicts.
For users who want to create a site from a GitHub repository, the GitHub Pages course can help explain how to share static content related to a repository, such as resumes, portfolios, and project blogs. In addition, users will learn how to enable GitHub Pages, choose a theme with Jekyll, use YAML, customize a site, and create and edit blog posts.
According to GitHub, more than 3,700 students have completed a Learning Lab course. Learning Lab is also available on GitHub Marketplace. Furthermore, the GitHub Marketplace offers a series of integrations that users can add to their repositories, such as Travis CI, Appveyor, Waffle, ZenHub, Sentry, Codacy, etc. For users who are already accessing learning lab from lab.github.com, their experience is not going to change.
There is a dedicated message board on the GitHub Community for GitHub Learning Lab courses, where users can discuss, ask questions or report issues regarding a specific course.
More details on GitHub Learning Lab courses can be found at lab.github.com.