Every current or aspiring developer, member of a team or work-from-home freelancer, ought to be using source control for their code. It allows you to make mistakes and be experimental without worrying about getting back to an application that once worked.

If you're still using FTP to deploy websites, knock it off. Here's a simple way to use git to deploy web sites and applications.

Because git is "decentralized" we can push and pull to and from several different remote repositories. So why not simply add our web server as a remote repository and push to it when we want to update it? The trick is in using the post-receive hook.

Developing web apps with Ruby on Rails has a lot of conveniences developers are almost smug about. Capistrano, though not a part of rails directly, I think belongs in the category. After using it once to deploy a site, I was sold.

There are a few ways to host git repositories remotely. Some make your life easier than others. Get introduced to tools like Gitolite and services like Github.

Here are some resources I have found to be helpful as I've learned (and continue to learn) git.

A tiny bit of instruction to point you in the right direction.