From the course: Version Control for Everyone

Version control: It's not just for programmers - GitHub Tutorial

From the course: Version Control for Everyone

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Version control: It's not just for programmers

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- Hi, I'm Joe Chellman and welcome to Version Control for Everyone. In my experience, creating things requires almost constant learning and that means making mistakes. So it helps to have ways to make more productive mistakes. We want to be able to experiment, try things that don't work out, and eventually get to that good solution we're picturing. Being afraid to make a mistake is a sure way to get almost nothing done. Working with computers, we have a couple of kinds of tools that make experimentation safer and easier, backups and version control, also known as revision control. In this course, we'll be looking at the latter. For our purposes, version control software is used to keep track of the work you're doing as you go. Maintaining a history of everything you've done, so you can go back to a previous version at any later time. It's like a combination of infinite Undo and Redo and keeping a journal. If you're like me, and you've always meant to keep a journal and are tired of people telling you you should, sorry. In this course, we're going to look at the basic workflow of working with version control in the context of a tech writing project. We'll see how to work through smaller or bigger bits of work and how to keep track of it all. Then, we'll see how version control can be applied to many different domains of work, including graphic design, digital prototyping, education and screen writing, and yes, even a little code. This course is part educational, part advocacy. Basically, I want to get rid of as much of the fear of version control tools as possible. If you've heard of them, and odds are if you're watching this now you have, you know version control software is designed and build largely by programmers, largely for programmers. As a result, people usually draw the not unreasonable conclusion that only programmers should work with version control. It's not true. Modern version control tools can work with almost anything you throw at them. Now, if you're a programmer, yes, it's true. You should be using version control and what we go over in this course will be very helpful to you as well. To the rest of you I say this, giving these tools a try could also really help you. Let's get started.

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