From the course: Programming Foundations: Version Control with Git (2020)

What is version control?

From the course: Programming Foundations: Version Control with Git (2020)

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What is version control?

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- In this last lesson, we took a look at what a makeshift version control workflow would look like. We manually managing your file versions. When using an actual version control system, also referred to as VCS for short, the system itself will track the changes within the same files. So we don't have to keep a bunch of extra copies. Let's look at the same workflow but with a version control system, like Git. We started with the first version of the HTML file. Then we made a change and created a second version. With VCS, the version history is tracked within the same file. So rather than having multiple copies, each version is basically a snapshot of the current state of all the files within the directory, using a concept called a commit. So if we add a CSS and JavaScript file in the next change, those two files and the existing HTML file and its versions will be included as one snapshot in the revision history. In the last example, we made another change to the HTML file while simultaneously experimenting with the CSS file in a separate area. With version control, this is called branching. When the CSS experiment is complete, we can merge back into the main version history. This will now include the new CSS file and the change made to the HTML file, captured in the same commit. If this all feels a little abstract still, that's okay. We'll be going through each of these concepts in more detail, step by step, throughout this course.

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