How to use github

Hi there!

Are you refering to the treehouse course on github? https://teamtreehouse.com/library/github-basics If you think it's outdated, please inform support on the menu tab above so it gets an update sooner :)

All github is is service that allows you to store git repositorys online and gives you some basic web based GUI tools to manage the repository. Sharing is more of a secondary feature - the point is to have your git repository available anywhere in the world and not just stored locally on one person's computer. The sharing side of things is really useful, and having your (curated) code on github is good when job hunting, but again, it's really about providing a "cloud" for git repositories first and foremost.

You wouldn't really CODE with it any more than you'd code with git in the command line - you can branch, commit, merge your code using it's tools and it does have basic editing tools too, but you'd still code on codepen or wherever and then export to github, then pull down to your computer, edit on the computer, commit the changes you made and push back to github. See? it's all centralised and taking control of git's powerful versioning systems :)

You don't have to use github - there are many other source code hosts. I used to use gitlab because they had unlimited private repos - so I could keep my pre-release stuff hidden from employers, but they had a massive data loss fiasco, and I haven't really gone back since. I now use bitbucket, but hear deveo is also really good - and both of them support mercurial version control if you don't want to use git (though you are usually expected to know git these days).

Hope it helps!

And thank you! It does help!