2 What is Git?

Git is a version control system - think of it like a time machine of your project. If something goes wrong with your current version, you can go back in time to a previous version that worked.

Git is especially useful when you are collaborating with other co-writers. You don’t have to ping-pong your documents via e-mail.

Cloud services like Dropbox are awesome, but with Git, you get a more powerful version controlling feature (i.e., the “time machine”).

You can build a whole research compendum and push it with Git to a repository. A research compendum is basically like a collection of folders consisting of all intellectual content of your research project, e.g. codes for the statistical analyses, manuscripts, figures and so forth.

By the way, you might be asking yourself, whether I have pushed this very guide, too, to a remote repository with Git? Well, I think you know the answer already.

In the next chapter, I’ll tell what you have to do to use Git on your computer.

Lightning Fast Git Guide by Ville Langén is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.