The home page of GitHub.com, shown in Figure 2-1, is a great starting point for many tasks, including starting your own project, learning about a topic, or exploring existing repositories.
The top menu bar, shown in Figure 2-2, is always available to you and is a direct link to the most important functions you need to perform.
» GitHub home page: If you click the GitHub logo in the top left of the browser, you return to the home page. Check out the sidebar “Mona Lisa Octocat” for more information on the logo.
» Search bar: The search bar on the top menu is pretty snazzy. Not only can you search all of GitHub, but as you start to use the site, it offers suggestions based on your most recent activity. These suggestions make it fast and easy to find the repository you were working on yesterday.
» Pull requests: The link to pull requests takes you to a list of all pull requests that you created, were assigned to complete, were mentioned in, or were asked to review. A pull request is a proposed change to the code of a repository. When first starting, you normally don’t have anything in this section, but as you start interacting with collaborative repositories, you get an overview of any tasks you may want to attend to. For more on pull requests, see Chapter 3.
If you click the Pull requests link, you might notice a ProTip, shown in Figure 2-3. The search bar for pull requests gives you several ways to specify a search to get exactly what you’re looking for. In fact, an entire page (https://help.gi.thub. com/articles/searching-issues-and-pull-requests) is dedicated to effective searching. You can find ProTips throughout GitHub.com, so be sure to look out for them.
» Issues: The list of issues is almost the same as the list of pull requests. The main difference between an issue and a Pull Request is that an issue is a report of a bug or a feature request. An issue doesn’t contain a proposed code change like a pull request does and therefore doesn’t require a reviewer.
» Marketplace: The marketplace on GitHub is a great place to find applications and tools that can help your collaborative coding workflow. For example, I have used AppVeyor, a continuous integration application, on projects. When you connect AppVeyor to one of your repositories, it continuously runs tests and deploys apps to make sure that every bit of code you’re adding won’t break what you’ve already built.
» Explore: The Explore link takes you to a list of things you may be interested in (see Figure 2-4). You may find events and opportunities that GitHub hosts or supports. For example, at the time we wrote this book, GitHub just released “The State of the Octoverse,” which presents a lot of interesting analytics about code on GitHub — for example, GitHub users made 1.1 billion contributions in 2018!
» Notifications: The bell icon leads you to a list of your notifications. See Chapter 1 for how to change your notification settings.
» Quick pick: The add-sign icon provides you with a list of quick actions you can take at any time: create a new repository, import a repository from another SCM, create a gist (a quick way to share code, notes, and snippets), or create a new organization.
» Account menu: The account menu appears when you click on your avatar.
Here, you can get to your profile, repositories, anything you’ve starred, gists you’ve created, the help documents, and settings and can sign out.
Source: Guthals Sarah, Haack Phil (2019), GitHub for Dummies, Wiley.