GitHub - A social network for programmers

GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service, that allows you to upload and share code with friends, co-workers, or with the whole world. GitHub is the largest online storage space of collaborative works, users are able to discuss, manage, create repositories, submit contributions to others' repositories, and review changes to the code. The flagship functionality of GitHub is “forking” – copying a set of code from one user’s account to another user account. This enables you to take a project that you don’t have write access to and modify it under your own account. You can then use the pull request to notify the owner of the original code that you've made changes and you’d like to share, if the owner of the original code is interested in the changes you've made, he can merge those changes from your repo with the original repo, with a click of a button. These features make GitHub very useful for programmers. It also provides social networking-like functions such as feeds, followers, wikis and a social network graph to display how developers work on their versions (forks) of a repository and which fork is newest, Hence it's called a social networking site for programmers.

At the heart of GitHub is Git. Like other version control systems, Git manages and stores revisions of projects. Although it’s mostly used for code, but it could be used to manage any other type of file, such as Word documents or Final Cut projects. Think of it as a filing system for every draft of a document. Projects on GitHub can be accessed and manipulated using the standard git command-line interface and all of the standard git commands work with it. GitHub also provides access control and several collaboration features such as task management, wikis, bug tracking and feature requests for every project.

GitHub has over 19 million repositories, making it the largest code host on the planet. Large or small, every repository comes with the same powerful tools. These tools are open to the community for public projects and secure for private projects. GitHub offers both paid plans for private repositories and free accounts, which is the ideal choice to host open-source software projects and as a matter of fact it is world's largest open source community.

Unlike Git, which is strictly a command-line tool, GitHub can be used within the browser with its web-based graphical interface or it could be installed on your Windows or Mac. It's Android app and mobile web views that let you keep track of your projects on the go. Know more about GitHub.