Branches: parallel versions of a project

As long as work goes in a straight line, commits form a chain. Work rarely goes in a straight line. You are on day two of rewriting a section of the report, and it turns out the published version has the wrong date and it has to be fixed now. Branches exist for exactly this: to keep several versions of a project at once without worrying that one of them will ruin another.

A branch is a pointer, not a copy

The word "branch" is misleading. It sounds like git copies the whole folder somewhere. It copies nothing. A branch is a pointer to one commit, and it lives in a plain text file inside .git:

$ git branch feature-x                 # create a branch
$ cat .git/refs/heads/feature-x
f57048622b87f0c63f9aafa9efbbde29b3d75746
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