Commits and the staging area

Git is a tool that saves snapshots of your project, called commits. Each commit is a version you can go back to. The daily loop has a few steps.

You edit files in your project folder, which Git calls the working tree. You choose which changes go into the next snapshot with git add; this is called staging, and the chosen changes sit in the staging area. You check what you are about to save with git status and git diff.

Then you save the snapshot with git commit, and git log shows the history. Staging lets you commit one logical change at a time, even if you touched several files. Learn this loop before anything else, because branches, pull requests and undoing mistakes all build on it.

Commit small and often. A commit for each working step means you can always go back to the last version that worked, instead of one giant commit at the end of the week.