What you should know

- [Instructor] To get the most out of this course, there are a few things you should be familiar with before starting. First and foremost, you'll need a GitHub account. You can create an account for free by going to github.com/join and signing up. You'll need to be familiar with creating and using Git repositories on GitHub.com. You'll also need to know how to work with repository branches. And you'll need to know how to push updated code to a repository as a commit. And finally, you'll need to know how to work with pull requests, particularly, how to open a pull request and then merge it into a branch. If you need a primer on working with GitHub, you can find courses here on LinkedIn Learning to get you up to speed. GitHub workflows are defined using YAML, so it'll be helpful if you're familiar with using YAML to serialize data. Don't worry if this is the first time you've worked with YAML, it's an approachable way to format data and we'll be reviewing YAML basics as we go along in the course. Containers are key to creating GitHub actions. If you're already familiar with Docker and using a Dockerfile to describe a container image, you'll be all set to create custom actions. If you've never worked with a Dockerfile before, don't worry. We'll go over the main keywords you need to know. We'll also be scripting a bit, so it will help if you're familiar with shell scripting or scripting in a higher-level language like Python or Ruby.