Git

Git is a powerful open source software adopted by many of the world's largest companies in their everyday software's such as Facebook, Netflix, Google and more. Its branching functionality is it's most popular feature for good reason in that the lightweight branches within your version control can be switched up or merged all together easily. It's also quite easy to use to return to a point in your commit history to create a fix branch. Having the ability to keep a gradual snapshot of your commits makes it almost development full proof as you can return to any point and resolve fatal errors until it's a thing of beauty. There's a huge active community of Git users which is nice in that you can usually get quality help freely with a bit of effort on the right forum. There are also learning resources available on GitHub and challenges you can do to help certify your learning curve. Git also integrates with a number of third party software's which further enhance its capabilities.

There are a lot of accounts by users that due to the collaborative nature of it the consistency may be lacking across documentation and commands, and when errors occur they can be cryptic and not easy to resolve. There's definitely a large learning curve involved with Git and will take some time to master it with any real level of proficiency. Nuances such as commits detached from the tree are not intuitive for new users. The user interface is not very user friendly and there seems to be a lot of ambiguity in the terminology available under the hood making it confusing and takes some time to research when moving along the path and it's not as efficient as possible. Actions are not checked against the server which means other users can edit the same file, which is the price to pay for efficiency and flexibility elsewhere I suppose. There's a lot of ways to do the same thing. And that's a learning curve all on its own. While the documentation could be drastically improved. I'm learning the Klingon language right now too so both together is a lot to take in. Just kidding, the Git documentation is cryptic enough to get my fill on its own.

Git by itself is relatively easy to set up and get going. You install it, open the command prompt and a new folder, make the command "git init" to create a new repository. Beyond that it's incredibly powerful functionality will take you some time to learn. If you have experience working with Linux via terminal it will seem more familiar perhaps. The performance of the software is good and by nearly all accounts if you're doing research into how fast it is. I like that you can make commits offline and then push them from your local repository after you're once again connected to the internet. And it's a good system for collaboration because others can contribute to your project with access to your repository as well.