
The GitHub Copilot Handbook: A practical guide to transforming the software development life cycle with GitHub Copilot
Author(s): Rob Bos (Author), Randy Pagels (Author), April Yoho (Foreword)
- Publisher: Packt Publishing
- Publication Date: November 10, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 290 pages
- ISBN-10: 1806116634
- ISBN-13: 9781806116638
Book Description
Discover the transformational impact of GitHub Copilot, from speeding up delivery, cutting grunt work, and transforming how your team codes, reviews, and ships software using the AI-powered features.
Key Features
- Automate code generation, test writing, and debugging with AI across your dev workflow
- Explore GitHub Copilot’s advanced features like PR reviews, error insights, and Copilot Chat
- Scale Copilot across dev, QA, and PM roles with guided onboarding and practical usage patterns
Book Description
Cross-functional product teams are under constant pressure to build and ship faster, but too much time is lost to manual coding, slow reviews, and fragmented workflows. That's where GitHub Copilot comes in, helping with regular coding tasks so that you and your team can focus on what you do best: adding value to the end users.
Written by industry experts Rob Bos and Randy Pagels — trainers who’ve helped hundreds of teams successfully adopt GitHub Copilot — this book showcases how GitHub Copilot impacts all aspects of engineering work, from ideation and requirements gathering, to writing code and scripts, to testing and debugging that code. Inside, you’ll explore advanced features like GitHub Copilot pull request suggestions, multi-file awareness, and contextual prompting. Plus, you'll discover how to integrate GitHub Copilot into your team’s workflows, roll it out successfully across roles, boost cross-role collaboration, and build a culture of AI adoption that scales.
By the end of the book, you will understand where GitHub Copilot makes an impact, moving beyond autocomplete and unlocking its full power across the entire software development lifecycle. Ultimately, this isn’t just about individual productivity — it’s about enabling the entire team to work smarter, faster, and more collaboratively with AI.
What you will learn
- Apply GitHub Copilot across the full software development lifecycle
- Understand how AI powers suggestions and where its limits are
- Boost productivity by automating tests, reviews, and pipeline fixes
- Integrate Copilot into IDEs and GitHub for maximum value
- Roll out Copilot across teams with proven onboarding strategies
- Build a knowledge-sharing culture with Copilot community champions
Who this book is for
If you work in the software engineering industry, such as a developer, tech lead, QA engineer, DevOps team member, or product manager, and DevOps teams – or if your work touches code, whether you're writing it, testing it, or reviewing it – this book is built for you. Here you’ll find practical ways to put GitHub Copilot to work, including understanding adoption strategies and its learning curve. No AI expertise is required – just a drive to ship faster, collaborate better, and work smarter with generative AI.
Table of Contents
- GitHub Copilot Explained
- Getting Started with Generative AI
- Choosing the Right GitHub Copilot Plan
- Reviewing GitHub Copilot IDE Functionality
- Exploring Integrated GitHub Copilot IDE Functionalities
- Discovering GitHub Copilot Features on GitHub.com
- Integrations on GitHub
- Extending Copilot with extra context
- Learning Curve
- Community: Sharing Examples
- Changing the narrative
About the Author
Rob Bos is a Microsoft MVP, GitHub Star, and trainer focused on DevOps, GitHub Actions, and team enablement. He empowers teams to work smarter with GitHub tools, automating processes, improving security, and driving value delivery through practical, hands-on learning. Rob speaks at conferences worldwide and shares his insights through blogs, courses, and workshops.
Randy Pagels is a Principal Trainer at Xebia USA and a former Microsoft veteran with 17+ years of experience. He designs and delivers hands-on GitHub Copilot, Actions, and AI training. Randy is known for his engaging teaching style, practical scenarios, and commitment to helping teams scale AI adoption confidently and effectively. He also speaks at developer conferences and industry events throughout the year.
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