Section: Creating a Topical Branch

Author: yangsu

Readme.md

@@ -16,3 +16,20 @@ There are 2 main work flows when dealing with pull requests:
 2. Pull Request from a branch within a repository
 
 Here we are going to focus on 2.
+
+### Creating a Topical Branch
+
+First, we will need to create a branch from the latest commit on master. Make sure your repository is up to date first using
+
+```bash
+git pull origin master
+```
+
+*Note:* `git pull` does a `git fetch` followed by a `git merge` to update the local repo with the remote repo. For a more detailed explanation, see [this stackoverflow post](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/292357/whats-the-difference-between-git-pull-and-git-fetch).
+
+To create a branch, use `git checkout -b <new-branch-name> [<base-branch-name>]`, where `base-branch-name` is optional and defaults to `master`. I'm going to create a new branch called `pull-request-demo` from the `master` branch and push it to github.
+
+```bash
+git checkout -b pull-request-demo
+```
+