Git in Practice

Appendix D. Why use version control?

You may sometimes find yourself speaking to people who aren’t familiar with version control concepts or why version control systems are useful for managing changes to text. This appendix provides a simple but effective argument for convincing others why version control is useful and important.

D.1. Handling changes

A common problem when dealing with information stored on a computer is handling changes. For example, after adding, modifying, or deleting text, you may want to undo that action (and perhaps redo it later). At the simplest level, this might be done by clicking Undo in a text editor (which reverts a previous action); after new words are added, it may be necessary to undo these changes by pressing ...