Recommend GitHub Guides to newhires.
I've been using GitHub everyday for the last 4 years. I think I spend 2+ hours everyday on the website. Some of it is spent opening issues. Some more spent opening Pull Requests. Some time spent commenting on open issues and pull requests. That probably covers 90% of the time I spend on GitHub.
This is what most software developers can expect if they join a company which uses GitHub for code/software.
On that note, becoming comfortable with the website, it's user interface and being able to take full advantage of it is very important to be productive at work. GitHub guides look pretty useful in that context, especially for new developers who have little to no experience with GitHub. I had been using GitHub before I joined Enthought but I was using it purely as a place to back up my code. commit -> push -> rinse and repeat.
Specifically, The "Hello world" https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/ guide is something that *every single developer* should go through if they intend to use master GitHub and be productive at work. I didn't know that I could create a new git branch on the website! And I've been using the website more and more to make trivial changes - instead of switching to a terminal/editor, making/pushing changes and switching back to open a PR.
For academics who share code, I didn't know (but I should have guessed) that Zenodo integrates with GitHub to make it easy to create and share DOI for GitHub projects/repositories - https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/ .
Mastering Issues https://guides.github.com/features/issues/ is very useful, especially to understand how you can collaborate with other developers on your team, how you can link issues with Pull Requests and how you can get notified of conversations on issues.
Finally, Mastering Markdown https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/ is very very important because the content of your issue, pull request or comment might be ignored if you don't present it well. Mixing code and text without appropriate formatting risks losing information in noise.
Final Note : I'm not sure when those guides were updated but there are parts of the guides which are definitely out-of-date. For example, Mastering Issues makes no reference to GitHub Projects. But. BUT. Information is out-of-date but the information available is still useful. It might be partial but it is definetely a good place to start.
This is what most software developers can expect if they join a company which uses GitHub for code/software.
On that note, becoming comfortable with the website, it's user interface and being able to take full advantage of it is very important to be productive at work. GitHub guides look pretty useful in that context, especially for new developers who have little to no experience with GitHub. I had been using GitHub before I joined Enthought but I was using it purely as a place to back up my code. commit -> push -> rinse and repeat.
Specifically, The "Hello world" https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/ guide is something that *every single developer* should go through if they intend to use master GitHub and be productive at work. I didn't know that I could create a new git branch on the website! And I've been using the website more and more to make trivial changes - instead of switching to a terminal/editor, making/pushing changes and switching back to open a PR.
For academics who share code, I didn't know (but I should have guessed) that Zenodo integrates with GitHub to make it easy to create and share DOI for GitHub projects/repositories - https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/ .
Mastering Issues https://guides.github.com/features/issues/ is very useful, especially to understand how you can collaborate with other developers on your team, how you can link issues with Pull Requests and how you can get notified of conversations on issues.
Finally, Mastering Markdown https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/ is very very important because the content of your issue, pull request or comment might be ignored if you don't present it well. Mixing code and text without appropriate formatting risks losing information in noise.
Final Note : I'm not sure when those guides were updated but there are parts of the guides which are definitely out-of-date. For example, Mastering Issues makes no reference to GitHub Projects. But. BUT. Information is out-of-date but the information available is still useful. It might be partial but it is definetely a good place to start.