GitHub has recently been in the news after a whopping $100 million dollars was pumped into the software for further development and expansion. GitHub is an application designed for programmers to network and simultaneously acts as a publishing and code sharing platform.

What usually happens when you work on a project is that whenever you make changes, you have to first import the file you want, make the changes and send the amended file by reconnecting to the server.

Since coding projects typically involve a lot of revisions, this becomes a long drawn and tedious process. The important plus point with GitHub is that these changes are automatically incorporated every time you make them.

While I would predominantly describe GitHub as a hosting tool, there are several add-on features that make this a powerful software package to reckon with.

Here's why:

• You have multiple task management tools and wikis to enhance your collaboration ability
• GitHub offers a powerful editing tool that is referred to as 'forking'. For example, if I want to make edits to a project that I do not have write-access to; I can pull down the repository into my user account, make my changes and share my changes too.
• Users also have access to integrated code reviews tools as well as bug-tracking features
• You enjoy live discussions and improved contribution management while working together as a team to develop a project
• GitHub facilitates user participation using the 'forking projects' feature and by providing updated monitoring tools for recording granular changes.
• You can search for open source projects using the help of multiple filters such as username, date of last change, date of creation etc

GitHub is a fantastic investment for aspiring and established programmers given they are able to follow a project from its initial stages right through to completion thus being able to learn a lot from programming gurus who were able to resolve major coding issues.