GitHub For Dummies

Introduction

Welcome to the world of collaborative coding! Whether you’re just starting your coding journey, building fairly complex programs, or building with a team of people, this book guides you in using one of the most used tools for collaborative code-writing; GitHub.com. With more than 31 million users and over 100 million repositories (projects) hosted, GitHub.com is the No. 1 place to build and collaborate on code.

About This Book

Though you spend many hours sitting at your computer, alone, debugging and writing code, the ideal coding team includes more than just you. Hundreds of developers spent more than four years building World of Warcraft before its first release in 2004. Although occasionally you can build a big hit like Flappy Bird alone, in a couple of days, the norm for software development is that you will work with other coders, designers, testers, user experience experts, product managers, and sometimes hardware engineers to bring something to the hands of users.

When you’re first starting out on complex coding projects, understanding effective ways to collaborate can be daunting. This book introduces you to the world of open source development (the epitome of collaboration), as well as effective ways to work with one other person — or even yourself over the course of many years! (I don’t know about you, but Sarah from three years ago knows stuff that Sarah from today can’t remember, and Sarah from today has more experience than Sarah from three years ago.) ...