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Comment by skydhash | Hacker News Reader

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skydhash·

The Pro Git book is available online for free

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

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This sort of thing is part of the problem. If it takes reading such a long manual to understand how to properly use Git, it's no wonder everyone's workflow is different.

I don't see it as a problem that everyone's workflow is different, and, separately, I don't see it as a problem that it takes reading such a long manual to understand all the possibilities of Git. There is no royal road to geometry. Pro Git is a lot shorter than the textbook I learned calculus from.

Unlike calculus, though, you can learn enough about Git to use it usefully in ten minutes. Maybe this sets people up for disappointment when they find out that afterwards their progress isn't that fast.

Agreed. Back when I first came across git in 2009 I had to re-read the porcelain manual 3 times before I really got it, but then the conceptual understanding has been useful ever since. I have often the guy explaining git to newbies on my team.

There's a lot more porcelain to document than there was then; maybe that's a less useful approach now.

Agreed. I'd read the manual if there was something I needed from it, but everything is working fine. Yeah I might've rsynced between some local folders once or twice when I could've used git, maybe that was an inelegant approach, but the marginal cost of that blunder was... about as much time I've spent in this thread so whatever.

The nice thing about knowing more about git is that it unlocks another dimension in editing code. It’s a very powerful version of undo-redo, aka time travelling. Then you start to think in term of changes and patches.

Ane example of that is the suckless philosophy where extra features comes as patches and diff.

Do you know any construction folks?

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