Appendix D. Downloading code and resources from GitHub
All the program codes and resources in this book are stored on a website called GitHub. This appendix introduces you to GitHub and walks you through how to access each of the chapter project files and download them. GitHub is a website used by coders and developers to manage and store their code. Often a website like GitHub are referred to as a repository or repo for short. So why not use another cloud-based storage instead, such as OneDrive, Google, or Dropbox?
The reason is because GitHub uses version control. Version control is a way to keep track of all different versions of documents, such as program files. Consider the example where you start writing a program and over the course of developing it you make 10 changes to the code. If you are using GitHub, then each of the previous 9 versions are stored and available on GitHub. This means that if you break the program code you can return to a previous version that worked. Furthermore, you can share any of these versions with other people without the worry that they will destroy or break the current code.