Okay.
So let's begin with a very important question.
What exactly is get?
So get is what's known as a version control system, sometimes abbreviated as VCs.
Not only is it a VCs, it's actually the world's most popular version control system.
So what exactly is a version control system?
It doesn't sound all that glamorous.
Essentially, version control is software that helps track and manage changes to a set of files over
time.
Also, doesn't sound all that glamorous or exciting, but hugely important.
Think of companies like Facebook or Google with huge code bases, thousands of files and thousands of
developers.
They're all working in parallel and making changes day to day.
How do you manage those and track those changes and combine them and undo changes?
That is the role of a version control system like Git.
In general, most version control systems allow things like revisiting earlier versions of files, comparing
changes made between different versions and different files.
Undoing changes, sharing changes with other people get does this and more.
We're going to go into this in just a little bit, but that's a general intro to this concept of version
control.
And to be clear, Git is just one of many version control options out there over the years.
They've kind of come and gone, but some of the more well-known ones include Subversion, CVS and Mercurial,
and they all have similar goals of helping developers or helping users track changes to projects over
time.
But they do have significant differences in how they operate, the syntax and how they achieve those
goals.
But the good news for us, I mean, obviously this is a good course, so we're going to learn git but
there's a good reason to learn get it is the clear winner if there ever was a version control system
war get is clearly the most popular these days.
This is the most recent data I could find from three years ago 2018 StackOverflow Developer Survey.
Nearly 90% of respondents reported that Git was their version control system of choice.
And the thing is, in the last few years, this survey has just stopped asking this question.
It's abandoned it because it's just so clear the number is probably more like 95% these days of developers
that use Git.
So we're here to learn Git.
That's good news for us.
I'll end by just showing you what Git calls itself on the Get Home page.
It's a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small
to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
It's easy to learn.
We'll see about that.
It's not bad to learn, but I wouldn't say it's painless and it has a tiny footprint with lightning
fast performance.
It outclasses other tools like subversion cves.
Oh boy, look at that.
Trash talking, the competition.
Anyway, the stuff we care about is up here.
It is a version control system that is git at its core.
It helps users manage changes to projects over time.
In the next video, we'll talk in more concrete terms about what Git actually does.