Create a GitHub account

GitHub is a Web-based Git repository hosting service, which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. Unlike Git, which is strictly a command-line tool, GitHub provides a Web-based graphical interface and desktop as well as mobile integration. It also provides access control and several collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, and wikis for every project.

This is what the homepage for github looks like. Here you can create an account for this course.

There is no cost to creating an account.

GitHub is a community where developers can discover, reuse, and contribute to projects.

As of 2015, GitHub reports having over 9 million users and over 21.1 million repositories. This would make it the largest code repository in the world.

You can not only host your projects for free on GitHub but you can also search and browse other projects.

The site provides social networking features like feeds, followers, wikis and a social network graph to display how developers work on their versions of a repository.

At the heart of GitHub Git.  Git is responsible for everything GitHub-related that happens locally on your computer.

As a user, you must create an account in order to contribute content to the site. Public repositories can be browsed and downloaded by anyone. With a registered user account, users are able to participate in online discussions as well as manage and create repositories and submit contributions to others' repositories.

Browse to http://www.github.com and sign up by following the prompts on the home page to create an account.

GitHub is free to use for public projects. Collaborate on private repositories with paid plans.

If you're not comfortable using the command line right now, GitHub lets you complete many Git-related actions without using the command line such as creating a repository and copying an existing repository to your account.

To put your project up on GitHub, you'll need a repository for it to live in. On GitHub, you can store all kinds of projects in repositories. Personal repositories belong to user accounts, so after you've signed up for GitHub, you can create your first repository.

A fork is a copy of a repository. Forking a repository allows you to freely experiment with changes without affecting the original project. Forks are commonly used to either propose changes to someone else's project or to use someone else's project as a starting point for your own idea.

One of the great features on GitHub is the ability to see what other people are working on and who they are connecting with. You can follow people on GitHub and watch projects.

There is plenty of documentation on the GitHub website which you can view by selecting this link.