It’s been a long time coming, but Google Code has finally added support for the wildly popular Git version control system. Git is a distributed version control system used by many popular projects including the Linux kernel, Ruby on Rails and Android.

Google Code, which offers free public hosting for collaborative software projects, started life as an SVN-based host and later added support for Mercurial. Google Code’s lack of Git support helped drive the meteoric rise of GitHub, one of the most popular places to host Git-based projects on the web today.

Now Google Code can compete with GitHub. But, thanks to GitHub’s slick interface and well-thought out features, Google Code seems unlikely to lure many away from their existing GitHub hosting. Still, if you’re a Google Code fan, but want to use Git, well, now you can.

To get started with the new Git features, head over to Google Code and create a new project. Under the Administration >> Source tab, you’ll see a new option to use Git as your version control system. One thing you won’t find with the new Git support on Google code is a way to migrate existing SVN projects over to Git. There are of course some very handy tools like git-svn, which makes transitioning from SVN to Git relatively easy. Once you’ve converted your project with git-svn, you can upload it back to Google Code using the new Git tools.

See Also:

• Speed Up Your Site With Google Analytics New Page Speed Tools
• Google Taps Danger Mouse to Show Off the Power of WebGL
• Google Doubles Down on ‘Microdata’ With New Recipe Search

There are several places on the web you can turn if you want to learn how to program.

Of course, this very site is the best place to start. Webmonkey has a massive library spanning over 13 years of web tutorials. There’s also Sitepoint and Smashing Magazine and O’Reilly Answers.

Today, we’d like to give some massive props to Google Code University, a site with a small (but growing) library of tutorials, slide shows, presentations and lectures about coding for the web. There’s also lots of just plain good advice for making everything from simple sites to full-blown apps. The site is heavy on video — most of the videos are lectures taken from Google’s internal tech talks — and on slide presentations. Everything is licensed under the Creative Commons, so you can use the code examples in your own projects providing you include attribution.

The Ajax and Python courses are pretty strong. The Geo APIs courses are valuable resources for anyone working with geodata. For more advanced topics, check out the Distributed Systems and Web Security tutorials.

See also:

• Get Started With Python
• Google Gets a New Geocoder
• Get Started With Google Geocoding via HTTP