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Computer programmers use Git and GitHub to do version control and keep track of changes they make to giant computer programs. But Git and GitHub are also great for sharing and collaborating on any project, even an open source Entertainment Law textbook.
Let's say a team of nine people want to collaborate on writing a textbook. All nine of them could pass a single Microsoft Word file around, turn on track changes, and edit each other's work, but that would quickly become quite cumbersome. As we know, there are many different versions of Word on many different platforms, and one misplaced formatting command could mess up the entire file.
GitHub uses plain text Markdown files, which makes it easy to keep track of who did what, and easy to review proposed changes and accept or reject them. Plus, the final product--a Markdown file--is easily converted to many different formats and shared, as web pages, Word docs, PDFs, or even EPUB.
Academics are paying attention to the possibilities. See for example the excellent series of articles by Konrad Lawson for The Chronicle of Higher Education's ProfHacker blog:
- Resources for Learning Git and GitHub;
- Getting Started With A GitHub Repository
- Direct Editing and Zen Mode in GitHub;
- Forks and Pull Requests in GitHub
- File and Repository History in GitHub
The source files in this repository are written in Markdown, a plain text formatting syntax designed to allow easy conversion to HTML and many other formats.
If you are curious about Markdown, the following links may help.
- Markdown Basics
- GitHub Flavored Markdown
- A Markdown Tutorial.
- Markdown: The Syntax You (Probably) Already Know, by Lincoln Mullen.
Markdown comes in dozens of different "flavors," and efforts to create a standard unambiguous syntax specification are underway at CommonMark.Org, along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate Markdown implementations against this specification. John MacFarlane, the creator of pandoc, the universal document converter, leads this mission.
To write Markdown files, you'll need a text editor. There are dozens to choose from. Many are free, others cost money, but are usually a lot cheaper than Microsoft Word. At the moment, Sublime Text seems to be very popular, and it is easy to use. I like Vim, and since I'm often working on a Mac, I use MacVim.
Why switch from writing in Microsoft Word to writing in a text editor? Sample a few opinions on the subject:
- Writing Power Tools: Text Editors, by Lincoln Mullen.
- Why Markdown Is Better, by Thorin Klosowski.
- Plain Text For Authors & Writers, by Richard Dooling.
If you decide to jump in, Google to find many free resources. These are just a few:
Richard Dooling
University of Nebraska College of law