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The GitHub Copilot Handbook

You're reading from   The GitHub Copilot Handbook A practical guide to transforming the software development life cycle with GitHub Copilot

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Product type Paperback
Published in Nov 2025
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781806116638
Length 290 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Authors (2):
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Rob Bos Rob Bos
Author Profile Icon Rob Bos
Rob Bos
Randy Pagels Randy Pagels
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Randy Pagels
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Table of Contents (18) Chapters Close

Preface 1. What is GitHub Copilot?
2. GitHub Copilot Explained FREE CHAPTER 3. Getting Started with Generative AI 4. Choosing the Right GitHub Copilot Plan 5. Getting Started with GitHub Copilot
6. Mastering GitHub Copilot in Your IDE: Inline Suggestions, Chat, and Agent Mode 7. Going Beyond Code: Debugging, Terminal, and Collaboration with GitHub Copilot 8. Exploring GitHub Copilot Integrations
9. Collaborating with Copilot on GitHub.com: Issues, PRs, Reviews, and Coding Agent 10. Extending GitHub Copilot with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) 11. Getting the Most Out of GitHub Copilot
12. Navigating the GitHub Copilot Learning Curve 13. Building an Internal GitHub Copilot Community 14. Changing the Narrative: Reframing Engineering with AI 15. Unlock Your Exclusive Benefits 16. Other Books You May Enjoy
17. Index

What is GitHub Copilot?

GitHub Copilot is a set of tools that can help you understand or produce code, either by helping you write code in an editor, talking to your code base to gain more information, or getting help from integrated functionality inside the web interface of GitHub.

This all starts with GitHub Copilot leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to complete the current line(s) of code that you are working on, by adding a suggestion when you stop typing for a couple of milliseconds, or when you hit the Return key. Depending on your color scheme, a suggestion is shown in gray or dimmed text in the editor, behind your cursor. You can see this in Figure 1.1, where the cursor is on line 9. This is also called “ghost text.” This text is a continuation of the code you already typed, and GitHub Copilot finds the most logical completion of the code and suggests it for you to accept.

Figure 1.1: Example of “ghost text” inside of VS Code

Figure 1.1: Example of “ghost text” inside of VS Code

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The GitHub Copilot Handbook
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The GitHub Copilot Handbook
Published in: Nov 2025
Publisher: Packt
ISBN-13: 9781806116638
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