Welcome to Github
The Github mascot, Octocat.
What is it?
Github is a social coding site that offers repository hosting and management services built around Git. It is currently the most popular code hosting site, and it has been at the forefront of encouraging and facilitating open source software development since its launch. Github offers free hosting and management tools for any public repositories, and it encourages people to assign open licenses to their software.
Github offers many functions that are useful to working on code and sites collaboratively with others. There are three major features that most people make use of:
- Code Hosting
Github hosts Git repositories and allows you to manage them using a variety of custom-built tools. - Static Website Serving
Github Pages is a service that will serve out static HTML, CSS, and Javascript files. Many projects use this feature to power the homepages (such as http://www.getbootstrap.com). - Text and File Post
Gists (as in "get the gist") on Github are like blog posts, or like a private pastebin. It is a way to put up information quickly and then be able to link to it, without having to create an entire repository.
There are many ways to find interesting projects on Github, and they all have a "Create Fork" button, which allows you to clone the project into your own account. From there, you can toy with it as much as you'd like, and if you make an improvement you wish to share, then you can push it back to the project owners. In this way, Github facilitates collaboration on major projects. Anyone can try out anything, and the tools are in place that help developers move work efficiently.
Getting Set Up
Creating an account on github.com is not very different from creating an account anywhere else online. There is no need to pay for an account on Github -- the free service is very robust. The primary enhancement in the paid service is that you can create private repositories that aren't shared with the world.