GITing it

It was not so long ago that I was at total noob to Git Hub and even after I’d gone through the motions of installing git hub and doing the exercises I still didn't quite understand what it was...

SO WHAT THE HUB IS GIT? 

GitHub is a site that stores files for free. That’s it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be files for computer programming. It can be image or text files or whatever you want.


WHY STORE FILES THERE?

  The cool thing about Git Hub is that it has been designed in such a way that multiple people can work on files at once. This is done by storing a copy of the files on the computer of each person who is working on the file and then when their changes to the file are uploaded back to GitHub it will identify what is different in your version of the file than the original and any other versions other people have created and will allow everyone involved to look at the changes and compare them.

Even if you are the only one working on the file, it is still quite handy to save it to GitHub because you will be able to look back at every version of the file you have saved — and if you are working on a computer program and you get off track in such a way that your program no longer runs OR doesn’t do what you had expected, you can back track and go back to an earlier version of the file before you got onto the wrong track and you can branch off in a new direction.

This process of saving different versions of a file and branching off in new directions is called Version control. And there are a lot of programs and sites that do this (Google drive can be used in a similar way for example), but GitHub is one of the most popular free sites to do this. And also, GIT lends itself nicely to puns.

HOW DO YOU USE GIT HUB:

These sites can help you GIT started:

Code School's Free intro to git hub

http://gitimmersion.com/

Pro GIT book