Your first repository

The first chapter explained why git exists. This one puts it on your computer. By the end of the chapter git will be installed, it will know your name, and one of your folders will be a repository.

Version control in plain words

Git is a time machine for a project. You ask it to remember the current state of your work, and it takes a snapshot: it records how every file looked at that minute. Snapshots line up in a chain, and you can go back to any of them: to yesterday's, to the one from three months ago.

That is how the folder full of report_final_v2_really_last.docx disappears. One file stays, with a sane name, and all of its past states live in the history, each one carrying a date, an author, and your own note about what changed.