In this case it is a younger college student who's interested in web development but hasn't done any CS learning and isn't generally familiar with tech.

Does someone who just wants to experiment with a little bit of web-dev really need to have version control right away? Seems a bit out of scope. That seems like a concept that can wait a few months while they actually just explore writing some code first.

> Does someone who just wants to experiment with a little bit of web-dev really need to have version control right away?

To explain: She wants to eventually work as a developer and has a project in mind guiding her. I started her with the simplest possible steps and she's been learning html & css for a few weeks now with some great progress. She got the the point where she was starting to have multiple projects she was building for learning. In addition, she was starting to feel the pain of "this project is on my desktop, but I am going to be away from home for a week and will only have my laptop." For those reasons (as well as the benefit of introducing GitHub as a place of collaboration), we took some a few hours to cover git and the terminal.

It didn't seem like we jumped to it too early and after those three hours she had the basics which is good enough to ensure her projects are safely replicated to GitHub and available for her no matter which machine she is on.

If the person learning just wants to write some HTML in a file and put that on a server somewhere as the index.html file then maybe version control is overkill.

But, if this person's goal is about creating a web application then version control is a good skill to have. I remember the days when source code for a web application was something we could zip up and hand to a client. But, these days, more than likely you have a remote server somewhere and you need to SSH into it and from there you could SFTP the files but at that point why not just use git and it's branch management. Obviously, there are more arguments that can be made for learning git.

Totally agree on this. So many coding (or even data science) courses start with Git which is just not that important for a newbie.

In the context of learning at work, there's a good chance they'll be trying to make some minor changes in an existing project, instead of doing something from scratch. For that they need to interact with the CVS.

or start with svn or something simpler to get the basics of source control.

SVN was the reason most people when I was in college didn't use source control at all. It was painful to install on Windows. There weren't good hosts for it. (CSV at least had bad old SourceForge.) Once you had it installed and had settled on a host computer (and SVN needs a host), configuring your repositories in it was a whole new mess. SVN is definitely not "simpler".

With git you can install and git init anywhere and go you have source control. Moving commits to another machine gets us into the complications way above of learning GitHub and tools for GitHub, but in terms of 0-60 on "start a repository so you can commit changes" it's really hard to beat.