What is GitHub, and how can I take advantage of the GitHub project?

Question

I am not a professional programmer. I Googled for some information about RoR, found a project that may suitable for me, and then found a GitHub link. What is GitHub about? Is it just a place for sharing source code?

Answer 1

Excerpt from Wikipedia:

GitHub is a web-based hosting service for projects that use the Git revision control system.

It is written using Ruby on Rails by GitHub, Inc. (previously known as Logical Awesome) developers Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Tom Preston-Werner. GitHub offers both commercial plans and free accounts for open source projects. According to the Git User's Survey in 2009, GitHub is the most popular Git hosting site.[2]

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

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So yes, github is about hosting and sharing code with a couple of extra features like network visualizations, bug tracking, wiki and project pages. Sounds not too exciting? Well, right now it is the top #976 site in the world (according to Alexa).

Answer 2

Github is the preeminent Git-based source code hosting repository. Its probably fair to say that its more than just a place for sharing source since there are other community elements, but that's its main function.