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I do agree that reading the documentation is helpful. But nothing beats using it. If people have a test machine or a VM to download/install git and create toy

I do agree that reading the documentation is helpful. But nothing beats using it. If people have a test machine or a VM to download/install git and create toy projects to learn the basics of git, that would be far more effective. Try branching, merging, diffing, committing, etc to get a better feel of how the source control system works. If you have background in subversion or other source control ( hell even experience in source safe might help ), then it would help you get caught up much faster. Also, there are tons of youtube videos on git if you learn better via video. But at the end of the day, if you don't use it, you aren't going to understand git.

kqr 9y ago
Easier said than done. My last team said they had used git a lot. Some were even very experienced. What they referred to was what I could most accurately describe with "Treating the GitHub website as a Dropbox except it forces you to confirm conflicting files on upload." I wish I could find the right words to convey what a nightmare that was. They ignored directory structure, straight up just committed any merge conflicts to the default branch, no sense in what happened in which commit, etc. Frequently overwrote each other's work, since their most reliable merge strategy was deleting the file entirely and then reuploading their own copy. By doing so, they created an endless series of conflicts where they alternatingly uploaded each of their copies -- both locally having a cohesive version, but anyone pulling from them got one or the other, depending on who uploaded last. They usually "fixed" this by hunting down the git conflict markers in the code and deleting just those, leaving two nearly indistinguishable copies of the conflicting hunk. Frequently the only difference was whitespace. If you tell a person lile that to "just use git more!" they would, best case, not know where to start. Worst case, they'd keep doing that.

kqr 9y ago

Easier said than done. My last team said they had used git a lot. Some were even very experienced. What they referred to was what I could most accurately describe with "Treating the GitHub website as a Dropbox except it forces you to confirm conflicting files on upload." I wish I could find the right words to convey what a nightmare that was. They ignored directory structure, straight up just committed any merge conflicts to the default branch, no sense in what happened in which commit, etc. Frequently overwrote each other's work, since their most reliable merge strategy was deleting the file entirely and then reuploading their own copy. By doing so, they created an endless series of conflicts where they alternatingly uploaded each of their copies -- both locally having a cohesive version, but anyone pulling from them got one or the other, depending on who uploaded last. They usually "fixed" this by hunting down the git conflict markers in the code and deleting just those, leaving two nearly indistinguishable copies of the conflicting hunk. Frequently the only difference was whitespace. If you tell a person lile that to "just use git more!" they would, best case, not know where to start. Worst case, they'd keep doing that.