Git and GitHub Explained

Intro To Git & GitHub

Git is distributed version control system (VCS) as some of you already know but for those who don’t know that and used google drive or some other similar service like Dropbox then you’ve already used a version control system. As Google Drive and Dropbox keep track of the files you’ve stored on them, Git was created to keep track of changes that you made in your code.

Basically, a version control system is one that tracks changes you made to your files and the data contained in them by making copies of it so that whenever you need to undo some changes you can do that by simply choosing that version of the file. These copies are generally called revisions of the file.

Each revision is associated with a timestamp and the person making the change. Revisions can be compared, restored, and with some types of files, merged.

VCS can be of two types centralized and distributed.

Centralized VC vs Distributed VC

As you can see on a central server VCS there is only one copy that is stored on the server but on a VCS every user has a local copy on their system and there is a global version that is available on the server so that the users can freely make changes on to their local copies and whenever they feel the need to save changes globally they can do that.

Git was developed to keep track of the code and it is created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 for the development of the Linux kernel, with other kernel developers contributing to its initial development. The latest version of GIT at the time of writing this post is 2.20 released on 2018–12–09.

That’s enough basics for GIT and Version Control Systems to get you started with the introduction to GitHub.

GitHub is a web-based hosting service for version control using Git.

Basically, you can think of GitHub as a server where you can have your Global copy of code and software like GitHub Desktop, and SourceTree as the clients which you can install on your system to keep a local copy of your code.

There are other hosting services that are available that are also based on Git like Bitbucket, GitLab, etc.

That’s it, for now, we’ll look more into GIT, how to use GIT, and Learn some basic GIT Commands to get you started using GIT in your day-to-day life in my next upcoming post.