So far through this demo we have been working on a single master branch. The master branch is simply a convention for stating what is the core branch of code that everyone should be committing to. Some don't use master and use conventions like stable and things along those lines.
So, how do we work with branches? Pretty simple really. The first thing we want to know what branches we have and what branch we are on:
$ git branch
You should see:
* master
And the word master should be highlighted. Great. This means that we have only one branch and that this is the one you are on. Let's make a new branch:
$ git checkout -b new-branch
What did we do here? git checkout is the command to checkout a branch, passing in the -b flag is to create and checkout a new branch, then new-branch is the name we passed in here. You can name a branch anything, but I suggest keeping is short so that it is easy to type as you will be switching branches a lot.
Ok, now let's see those branches again:
master
* new-branch
Cool. We have two branches and since we used the -b flag when we created the branch, this also switched us to that new branch right away.