GitHub is the biggest Code-Sharing Platform on the Internet and is based on the Version Control System Git.

The platform is commonly used in the Software Development Community to share and collaborate on projects.
As the platform is not limited to code and any text-based formats can be managed, people outside of the development community also started to use GitHub.

• GitHub also provides desktop applications that abstract the command line only git program.
• It also offers a nice educational package for students that involves also other tools.

Links

• There is an online tutorial for beginners that want to learn git.
• Other video tutorials can be found here.

Key Git Terminology

Repository - A directory that stores all the files, folders of a project.

Master - The primary branch of all repositories.

Commit - The action of storing a new snapshot of the project’s state in the Git history.

Fork - Creates a copy of a repository.

Branch - A version of the repository that diverges from the master of the project.

Push - Updates a remote repository with the commits made to the repository. 

Fetch - Download and copy remote repository files to your workstation.

Pull request - A request to merge your branch with a master branch. The repo maintainers can review and merge the branch into master.

gitignore - A file the specifies files or files types that should be ignored in commits