What exactly is GitHub and how does it work?

Just to clarify, many people mix up Git and GitHub. Git is the actual tool that does the version control, while GitHub is a service that uses Git to host your projects online. So if you learn Git, you’ll be prepared to use GitHub effectively!

GitHub is mainly about version control, allowing teams of developers to collaborate on code while keeping everything organized. Even for solo developers, it’s super useful. In simple terms, it helps you save snapshots of your code as you make changes, so if something breaks, you can easily go back to a previous working version. There’s a lot more to it, but this is the foundational way to think about it.

GitHub is kinda like working on a collaborative Google Doc. Everyone works on their own version of the document (the code), and once you make your changes, you upload them to GitHub. It helps you merge changes from different people and keeps a history of all modifications, which is super handy for rolling back if something goes haywire.

Think of coding like cooking. When you create a dish, that’s your finished product. Now, GitHub is like a place where you store your recipe. But it’s more than that. As you cook, you might tweak your recipe—adding more spice, changing the ingredients, or removing something. Git (the tool behind GitHub) keeps track of those changes, so if a tweak goes wrong, you can revert back to an earlier version of your recipe. In essence, GitHub stores your 'recipes' and their history, making it easier to share with others and access them from different machines.

You could think of GitHub like Google Drive, but specifically for code. It uses Git behind the scenes, which tracks every change you make, similar to that auto-save feature in Google Docs where you can check the edit history. Just remember, you’ll need to manually save those changes with Git.