1. Basic Concepts Workspace: the working area, the project files Index: the staging area, also called the pending-commit area; before a commit enters the repo, all updates are placed in the staging area Local Repository: the local repo, the version repository kept locally; HEAD points at the current development branch

This article is built around Git, the tool that controls all of our source code. 1. Why Git? For an in-depth discussion of the pros and cons of git versus centralized source control systems, see here. There has been far too much heated argument on this subject. As a developer, I currently prefer Git over other tools.