Programming Skills for Data Science: Start Writing Code to Wrangle, Analyze, and Visualize Data with R, First Edition

3Version Control with git and GitHub

One of the most important parts of writing code to work with data is keeping track of changes to your code. Maintaining a clear and well-documented history of your work is crucial for transparency and collaboration. Even if you are working independently, tracking your changes will enable you to revert to earlier versions of your project and more easily identify errors.

Alternatives to proper version control systems—such as emailing code to others, or having dozens of versions of the same file—lack any structured way of backing up work, and are time-consuming and error-prone. This is why you should be using a version control system like git.

This chapter introduces the git command line program and the GitHub ...