First, we need to answer the question:

What is version control?

Whenever we work on important documents, we know that we should keep key versions

Version control systems (VCS) are software that handle versioning effectively

Which VCS should I use?

Several systems have been developed over the years with various functioning

Git

Git is an open source distributed VCS created in 2005 by Linus Torvalds for the versioning of the Linux kernel during its development

In distributed VCS, the full history of projects lives on everybody’s machine—as opposed to being only stored on a central server as was the case with centralized VCS. This allows for offline work and multiple backups

Git also introduced an extremely powerful and light-weight branching system

Git is extremely powerful and almost universally adopted

How does Git work?

Git saves the history of a project as a series of snapshots

These snapshots are identified by commits

Each commit has a unique hash and contains the following metadata:

• Author
• Date and time
• The hash of parent commit(s)
• A descriptive message

When you create the 1^st commit, a pointer called a branch is created and points to it

By default, that first branch is called main

Another pointer (HEAD) points to the branch main. HEAD indicates where you are in the project history

As you create more commits the pointers HEAD and main move automatically

As you create more commits the pointers HEAD and main move automatically

For simplicity, the diagrams can be simplified this way

How can these commits be used?

You can revisit old commits by moving HEAD to them

You can create multiple branches to explore freely and safely

You can merge branches to bring your experiments into your main branch