Welcome to the world of collaborative coding! Whether you’re just starting your coding journey, building fairly complex programs, or building with a team of people, this book guides you in using one of the most used tools for collaborative code-writing; GitHub.com. With more than 31 million users and over 100 million repositories (projects) hosted, GitHub.com is the No. 1 place to build and collaborate on code.

About This Book

Though you spend many hours sitting at your computer, alone, debugging and writing code, the ideal coding team includes more than just you. Hundreds of developers spent more than four years building World of Warcraft before its first release in 2004. Although occasionally you can build a big hit like Flappy Bird alone, in a couple of days, the norm for software development is that you will work with other coders, designers, testers, user experience experts, product managers, and sometimes hardware engineers to bring something to the hands of users.

When you’re first starting out on complex coding projects, understanding effective ways to collaborate can be daunting. This book introduces you to the world of open source development (the epitome of collaboration), as well as effective ways to work with one other person — or even yourself over the course of many years! (I don’t know about you, but Sarah from three years ago knows stuff that Sarah from today can’t remember, and Sarah from today has more experience than Sarah from three years ago.)

GitHub For Dummies is written as a reference guide. Each part introduces you to a different aspect of collaborative coding. So if you’re experienced in using GitHub, but you’re new to the open source community, you can jump to Part 5 and skip some of the GitHub basics.

As you explore each part of this book, keep the following points in mind:

• Words that are being defined appear in italic.
• Code and URLs (web addresses) are shown in monofont.
• Command sequences using onscreen menus use the command arrow. For example, when working in Scratch, you can open a new project as follows: From the menu bar, choose File ⇒ New.
• The figures you see in this book use Mac and Chrome. We provide some tips when what you see on a Windows PC may be different, but you should see the same things, regardless of which Internet browser you use.

Foolish Assumptions

In this book, I make some assumptions that very well may be foolish, about you, your coding experience, and your goals.

• You're interested in and have had some experience with coding. You don’t have to be an expert coder, but you have made a Hello World application (or the equivalent) in at least one programming language.
• You have patience and determination and are resourceful. When you’re presented with a challenge, you can Google your way to finding a solution. This book guides you through GitHub.com as it exists at the time of writing it, but new features and workflows are being created, and part of your collaborative coding journey is to discover how to use those new features as they become available.
• You have experience with a keyboard and mouse on either Mac or Windows PC and have access to one of those machines.
• You’re capable of using an Internet browser, such as Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, and you can type a URL to access a website, such as GitHub.com.
• You know how to install applications on your computer. Although we guide you through anything that is unique to the setup, you should know how to download and install an application without step-by-step guidance.

Icons Used in This Book

Throughout the margin of this book are small images, known as icons. These icons mark important tidbits of information:

The Tip icon identifies places where we offer additional tips for making this journey more interesting or clear. Tips can start you on a rabbit hole down another workflow, not covered in this book, or cover some neat shortcuts that you may not have known about.

The Remember icon bookmarks to important ideas to help you work more effectively throughout this book.

The Warning icon helps protect you from common errors and may even give you tips to undo your mistakes.

Beyond the Book

In addition to what you’re reading right now, this product also comes with a free access-anywhere Cheat Sheet that covers common commands and GitHub actions. To get this Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and search for “GitHub For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.

Other online resources also pair with this book:

• Online articles covering additional topics are available at www.dummies.com/extras/github.
• Updates to this book, if any, can be found at www.dummies.com/extras/github.
• GitHub Learning Labs are free, guided tutorials that can be installed and found at https://lab.github.com.

Where to Go from Here

GitHub is a tool used by millions of developers. The workflows that you discover in this book is just the beginning. As you become a more experienced coder, begin to collaborate on more elaborate projects, or join different companies and teams, you may encounter new workflows that use these tools in different ways. You should feel empowered to explore! Visit https://help.github.com or https://guides.github.com for guidance and don’t forget to follow the blog at https://blog.github.com/ to stay up to date with all of the new features!