Version Control Systems

In order to get a better understanding of what Git is, we start off by explaining what a Version Control System (VCS) is.

A VCS allows you to keep a history of versions of documents. Usually we write a document only to make changes to it in the future. Take this document for example, I am sure it will change over time.

But what if these changes need to be undone or what if we want to see when certain changes were made? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to look up that information? Or undo certain changes? Maybe you just need the older version of a document for some reason.

This is exactly what a VCS does. It will keep track of different versions of documents for you in an organized way.

There are a lot of different systems out there to choose from, including SVN, CVS, Mercurial, TFS and of course Git…