In the movies we see the lone developer in a dark room typing furiously on his keyboard whilst code is magically scrolling over his screen. That's not how it works in the real world. Projects sometimes span millions of lines of code, and it is simply not practical for a single programmer to create this. Programming is a team sport and the way that we coordinate our efforts is with source control systems. An introductory course in programming should thus begin with a quick overview of what a source control system is and how to use it.

We are going to talk about Git - the most popular source control system in use at the moment. Amongst Git servers, the most popular is GitHub, owned by Microsoft. Even the Java sources are now stored on GitHub. Because GitHub is the most popular, your first task is to create an account there (next section)

Why "Juppies"? - The word "Java" is trademarked by Oracle Corporation when used in conjunction with a programming language. Traditionally, we prefix anything that might be related to Java with "J", such as "Jalopy", "Jetbrains", "Jfokus", etc. When thinking of the target market, I thought of guppies, the cute little fish that are found in fish tanks around the world. So this became "Juppies". But we could also imagine a litter of beautiful golden retriever puppies trying to learn about the world. Enter "Juppies". A course for anybody wanting to learn how to program in Java.