What exactly is GitHub and how does it work?

Think of your coding like cooking. The final product is your completed dish, and GitHub serves as a place to store your recipes. It tracks all your tweaks, so if you change something and don't like it, you can go back to an earlier version of your recipe. Git is the system that tracks the changes over time, while GitHub is where you can share those recipes and revisions with others.

A lot of folks confuse Git and GitHub, but GitHub is essentially Git as a service, with extra features for collaboration. It’s meant to help keep everything organized and manageable, especially when multiple people are involved in a project.

You can think of GitHub like a specialized notebook that keeps track of every version you've saved. It's designed for code, and it works alongside Git, which is the underlying technology that makes tracking changes possible.

At its core, GitHub is a version control system that helps teams work collaboratively on a codebase. It lets you create snapshots of your code, so if a recent change breaks things, you can easily revert to a previous working version. While it’s very useful for teams, solo developers benefit from it too.

If you’ve worked with Google Docs, it’s similar but specifically for coding. When you make changes to your code, you upload (or 'push') them to GitHub. You can check who else made changes, and if something breaks, rolling back to previous versions is easy.