March has been a workshop-rich month: today I attended “Git for Fun & Profit, or How Git May Save Your Life,” presented by Mark Tomko in the GSLIS Tech Lab. He designed this workshop recently with the Digital Libraries class in mind, and it was a great overall as well as practical intro.

In plain English, version control systems (VCS) allow users to keep track of changes to a set of files and directories. For example, if you’re working on a website and you break something but can’t figure out what, you can always revert to a working version and start over from there. VCS also allows multiple users to read and modify the same files simultaneously. Git is available to download for free, and there are lots of web resources for users.