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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with this idea. The best way to learn git is to read the git book, in this order: chapters 1, 10, 2, 3, and the rest at your discretion. This way teaches you about the internals first, and if you understand the internals the rest of git is pretty intuitive.

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2

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Great idea. This kind of culture is why there are a lot of people that don't and probably never will use git.

There's something to be said about reading documentation rather than relying on stackoverflow answers or possibly inaccurate tutorials.

Substitute C, Java, Python, etc for git. You can probably do something with those languages, but you aren't going to get very far without reading some sort of documentation.

The article is about how to get a more fundamental understanding idea on how git works, and this book demonstrates fundamental ideas on how git works. I don't see a problem in this reccomendation. If you want just a cursory knowledge of how to use git to get by, this probably not the right choice, but that's not really what this discussion is about is it?

Well, that is what the article is about.

Unfortunately, it isn't possible to effectively use git without knowing something about the internals. You can do the basics taught more 'by rote', but sooner or later you're going to run into something unexpected, or something complex you need to do and you need to understand the data model in order to have a chance of sorting it out.

That's a lot of reading for a tool that should be making life easier.

It's an engineering tool. You'll be using it all day every day for the rest of your career, the investment is worth it.

That's simply not true for many Git users. I'm a developer, so I do use Git every day, but I work with a bunch of researchers that absolutely do not need to use Git more than once a week at most. Convincing those people to care enough to learn the internals has been a constant uphill battle for me.

I will save this answer for when anyone complaints about C++ or Rust being complex languages.

How about now :) Rust and C++ are complicated languages, and that's bad.

But git isn't complicated. Git is a handful of simple ideas composed in interesting ways. It looks complicated because there's a lot of porcelain commands with a lot of options, but all of them are just manipulating the same simple internals which, once understood, are clear and intuitive.

Many people would disagree---the permutation of simple ideas gets...less simple quickly.

On the other hand, I've used ClearCase.

(Do not use ClearCase.)

That is the thing, dealing with git issues brings back flashbacks of using Clearcase views on UNIX.

I see you got my devil's advocate gist. :)

Thing is, dealing with git feels like being in the early 2000's using Clearcase views.

The difference being that you will likely spend hours of your day thinking in rust, while git should be taking minutes of your day, but often ends up taking hours when you screw up a command and need to restore things to how they were.

You could say the same bout Stack Overflow, but its a lot more intuitive.

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