I normally consider myself pretty handy with computers, but I’m no programmer. I know GitHub is primarily for programmers, but I often find GitHub pages when looking for specific programs, and always end up walking away frustrated because anything I try to download just gives me a whole bunch of unfamiliar file-names and what I’m guessing is some uncompiled data? I really don’t know, and it just confuses me what I’m supposed to do in order to actually execute files I find on GitHub? I’ve heard something about Python and something about Cmd (Is that Windows Command Line Prompt?) and whenever I look up tutorials or guides for GitHub I find primer videos for programmers, not user friendly newbie guides for people who just want to download a piece of software.
In: Technology
Git is a version control system used by programmers, basically, you don’t want to just save your source files every time your done programming something, and it can be quite valuable to know how things looked like in the past, in addition it makes it easier to work with others, so you don’t just end up overriding each others source files, Git goes a bit further than this, for example you usually “bundle” your changes in “commits”, so you don’t just change one file but that’s a different topic.
GitHub is a website used to provide Git repositories, if a project is public, you can download the programs sourcecode and immediately have it in your version control system (Git), so working with others is easier.
This also means that most of the time, if you land on GitHub that means you’re dealing with uncompiled code, so to run it you need some sort of compiler, and usually an IDE is recommended and on some projects you have to first set up a few things to be able to compile something.
Finally, some developers are nice enough to provide a link to the final executable where you can just download it and install it on GitHub, check their descriptions or ReadMes, usually there’s some info there.
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