Branch

Git is incredibly good at making branches, which are effectively copies of a repository where we can make (possibly experimental) changes without modifying the parent files. In most cases, the parent repository is the master branch, and we can create a new topic branch by using checkout with the -b flag

Here the second command, git branch, just lists all the local branches, and the asterisk * identifies which branch we’re currently on. Note that git checkout -b modify-README both creates a new branch and switches to it, as indicated by the asterisk in front of the modify-README branch. (If you set up the co alias in Section 1.3, you can use git co -b modify-README instead.)

            The full value of branching only becomes clear when working on a project with multiple developers,18 but branches are helpful even for a single-developer tutorial such as this one. In particular, the master branch is insulated from any changes we make to the topic branch, so even if we really screw things up, we can always abandon the changes by checking out the master branch and deleting the topic branch. We’ll see how to do this at the end of the section

   By the way, for a change as small as this one I wouldn’t normally bother with a new branch, but it’s never too early to start practicing good habits.