Git Introduction

Git is a distributed version control system — it records every change to your code as a timeline you can navigate, branch, and share. It's the single most important tool in professional development.

What Git gives you

• History — every version is saved; you can see what changed, when, and by whom.
• Undo — go back to any past state without losing work.
• Branching — build features in isolation, then merge them.
• Collaboration — many people work on the same project without overwriting each other.

Git vs GitHub

They're often confused: Git is the tool that runs on your machine and tracks changes. GitHub (and GitLab, Bitbucket) are websites that *host* Git repositories for sharing and teamwork. You can use Git entirely offline with no GitHub at all.

Distributed by design

Unlike older systems, every developer has the full history locally. You commit, branch, and view history offline; you only need the network to share (push) or receive (pull) changes.

The everyday workflow

# 1. make changes to files
git add .                 # 2. stage them
git commit -m "message"   # 3. save a snapshot
git push                  # 4. share to the remote