Understanding Github

To the beginner github, which most developers will assume you just use and understand, can appear quite confounding. You’ll hear words like ‘repository’, ‘commit’, ‘pull’ and as complicated as it sounds, it would only take an hour or so of your time to set up an account and completely understand how it all works.

Github is a version control system. That’s a fancy phrase for simply having some code, and keeping track of the changes you make to it. This is handy, especially for big projects, and if you are collaborating. It’s also useful for deployment (which is the word we use for when you’re actually making your project live on the web and putting it on a web host (more on those in a future post).

The best tutorial I’ve come across on Github is produced by Github itself.

https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/

Check out the link and tutorial above and start by following the instructions to create (and play with) your own repository.

Once you understand the basic terminology you can look into doing the same actions using a shell.