Let’s head over to Software Carpentry for a lesson in version control.

The take-home messages from this lesson should be:

  • Version control is essential to reproducible science
  • Version control provides a safe and effective way:
    • to collaborate
    • to have data, code and documents on multiple computers
    • to back up your data to the cloud.

In addition to GitHub, you can also host git repositories on Bitbucket.

If you get sick of constantly typing your password into git, you might choose to use ssh keys to avoid this problem. There are instructions for GitHub and for Bitbucket. Note that you can (and should) use the same ssh key for both sites.

In your copious free time, you should also register for the GitHub student pack, which will give you unlimited private repositories as well as other goodies.