Welcome to Branching and Merging, the third module of the course — and the part of Git that makes real, parallel work possible. A branch lets you develop a feature, try an experiment, or fix a bug in isolation, without disturbing your main line of work. Merging brings those lines back together. Once branches click, you’ll use them constantly — for every feature, every fix, every “let me just try something.”

You’ll learn that a branch is simply a movable pointer to a commit, create and switch between branches with git switch and git branch, and understand the two ways Git merges — fast-forward and three-way. You’ll face merge conflicts head-on, learn to read the conflict markers, and resolve them without fear. And you’ll meet git stash, the command that shelves half-finished work so you can switch contexts in a hurry. The module ends with a guided project: you’ll develop two features of SkyLog on separate branches and merge them both — including resolving a real conflict between them.

Every command was run for real, with output shown exactly as Git produced it. Start with Lesson 1, where you’ll learn what a branch actually is.