You will use Git to create local repos on your computer, and GitHub to host remote repos.
The Github repos you create for this course can serve as a useful WebDev Code Portfolio, to add to your resume.
To get started, sign up for a free Github account.
GitHub is one of InfoWorld’s 2015 Technology of the Year Award winners:
GitHub is one of about 18 public Git hosting sites, and it supports both public, open source projects and private, proprietary code. Public repositories are free; private repositories cost money to host, but only about $1 per repo per month. Each repo can be up to about 1GB; that isn’t a terrible limit if you restrict yourself to storing source code and a reasonable number of small images, but you can run out of space quickly if you try to store binary builds, media, external dependencies, backups, or database dumps. GitHub will warn you if you push files past 50MB and will reject files exceeding 100MB.
Where GitHub differentiates itself is in the social aspects of coding and in its client software. While you can’t really use Git effectively unless you can drop down to the command line at need, the GitHub client does a good job of implementing the Git features you need on a daily basis, and it automatically updates itself. In addition, the client integrates with GitHub’s very nice, free Atom programming editor, which in turn integrates well with GitHub repositories.
The social aspects of GitHub – following people, forking and watching projects, making pull requests, reporting issues, and sharing Gists – are important enough that I tell developers they should be on GitHub no matter where else they keep or use code repositories. Plus, some of the most important and popular Open Source projects are on GitHub, including Bootstrap, Node.js, Angular, jQuery, D3, Ruby on Rails, and the Go language.