“Boost Your GitHub DX” out now

2025-11-11 The book art: a cybernetically enhanced cat.

My new book, Boost Your GitHub DX is out now!

This is a book about using GitHub more effectively, touring you through the fundamental features with my experience-based commentary. It covers settings, keyboard shortcuts, hidden features, syntax, techniques, CLI commands, and even improving your writing. These tools will help you collaborate more effectively with your team and deliver higher-quality software faster.

The book consists of 337 pages across 11 chapters, as outlined below, and makes a great complement to my previous book, Boost Your Git DX, which focuses on using Git itself.

As a combined release and Black Friday discount, the book is 50% off, from $44 to $22, until the end of Cyber Monday (1st December).

Read a free sample (2 chapters) or Buy it now.

Team licenses are available and there’s an automatic regional discount for those in lower-income countries. It comes in DRM-free PDF, ePub, and AZW3.

Full table of contents

Here’s what you’ll learn within:

Introduction
1. About this book
  - Read in any order
  - Copilot
  - Example commands and resources
  - End-of-chapter feedback links
2. Acknowledgements
3. Changelog
Global features
1. Keyboard shortcuts
  - Item list shortcuts
  - Keyboard navigation
2. Pages
  - Dashboard
  - Feed
  - Issues dashboard
  - Pull requests dashboard
  - Notifications
  - GitHub Community Discussions
  - GitHub Status
3. Feature previews
4. Command palette
  - Enable the feature preview
  - Open and search
  - Change scope
  - Open help with ?
  - Default mode
  - Issue and pull request mode (#)
  - Organization, repository, and user mode (@)
  - File mode (/)
  - Command mode (>)
5. Refined GitHub: a browser extension
  - Install
  - Top features
gh: the GitHub CLI
1. Install and set up
  - Install the CLI
  - Log in
  - Log in to multiple accounts
  - Configuration
  - Set up the Git integration
  - Activate shell autocomplete
2. Browser commands
  - Open things in the browser with gh browse
  - Open some other things in the browser with -w (--web)
  - Configure a different browser
3. Command commonalities
  - Get help with --help or gh help
  - Select repository with -R (--repo)
  - Pager integration
  - Editor integration
  - Markdown rendering
  - Object numbers
4. Aliases
  - Shell aliases
  - gh aliases
Repositories
1. Settings
  - Recommended repository settings
  - Adopt recommended settings with gh api
2. Features
  - Watch modes
  - Insights
  - Activity
  - Archive mode
  - github.dev
3. Keyboard shortcuts
4. gh commands
  - gh repo clone
  - gh repo fork
  - gh repo set-default
  - gh repo create
Files
1. Navigation
  - File list
  - File tree
  - Commit switcher
  - File path
  - Go to file
  - Commit details
  - The “Center content” option
2. File view
  - Preview mode
  - Code mode
  - Blame mode
3. Keyboard shortcuts
Commits
1. Features
  - Header
  - File tree
  - Diff
  - URL hacks
2. Keyboard shortcuts
GitHub-Flavored Markdown
1. Features
  - Fixed-width font setting
  - Slash commands
  - Saved replies
2. Syntax
  - Basic syntax
  - Niche syntax
3. Keyboard shortcuts
  - Paste
Writing
1. General guidelines
  - Basic rules
  - Titles
2. Tools
  - Grammarly
  - LanguageTool
3. Glossary
Issues
1. Features
  - Issue list
  - Issue search syntax
  - Labels
  - Create new issue
  - Issue details
2. gh commands
  - gh issue develop -c
  - gh issue create
  - gh issue status
  - gh issue list
  - gh issue view
Pull requests
1. Features
  - Pull request list
  - Create a pull request
  - Pull request details: Conversation
  - Pull request details: Commits
  - Pull request details: Checks
  - Pull request details: Files changed
  - URL hacks
2. gh commands
  - gh pr status
  - gh pr create
  - gh pr checkout
  - gh pr diff
  - gh pr view
  - gh pr merge
GitHub Actions
1. Features
  - Run list
  - Run details
  - Job details
  - Job links
  - Repository settings
2. gh commands
  - gh run watch
  - gh run list
  - gh run view
  - gh run rerun
gh api: use GitHub’s APIs
1. GitHub’s two HTTP APIs
2. The REST API
  - Template the endpoint URL with {owner}, {repo}, and {branch}
  - Transform output with --jq
  - Change request method with -X (--method)
  - Add request parameters with -F (--field) and -f (--raw-field)
  - Expand permissions for some write operations with gh auth refresh
3. The GraphQL API
  - Write a basic query
  - Write an advanced query
  - Transform output with --jq
  - Write a basic mutation
  - Build up queries with the GraphQL Explorer
Outroduction
1. Honourable mentions
  - GitHub features and tools
  - Third-party tools
  - Just for fun
2. Thank you

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all who helped me write this book.

In particular, thanks to all beta readers who gave me feedback: Alberto Morón Hernández, Alex Hatfield, Clifford Gama, David Cantrell, Gav O'Connor, Lance Goyke, Ngazetungue Muheue, Raffaella Suardini, and Tom Forbes.

I want to thank my dear wife, Mafalda, for helping me push through writing another book and working hard to make sure that I got valuable writing time. And thank you to my older son, Gerry, for the occasional joyful interruption to go play Lego, and to my younger son, Sebi, for sling cuddles during the final writing sessions.

And finally, thank you to all my dear readers for purchasing this book. I hope you learn some valuable things.

Fin

May your development experience always improve,

—Adam

One summary email a week, no spam, I pinky promise.

Tags: git, github