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I have taught git for university classes for some years. To be honest, git is a mess. It is conceptually not that hard, but the nomenclature is inconsistent and

I have taught git for university classes for some years. To be honest, git is a mess. It is conceptually not that hard, but the nomenclature is inconsistent and dangerously ambiguous (quick, what is the difference between reset, rebase, revert, and checkout?). The most effective work flow I have found so far, is teaching only status/clone/pull/add/commit/push. Show them explicitly what happens normally, what happens when two changes conflict, and how to resolve merge conflicts. Using git on the command line only. Then, have the students use git for a big-ish multi-student project. They will figure out the workflow themselves. After that project, once they understand the basics, you can talk about branches, debasing, the log and reflog, pull requests, and all the rest. Don't introduce graphical front ends before this point. This method works well. It takes about one hour of teaching, and five weeks of active use afterwards. Git is a total pain to learn, and can only be understood by actively using it. I often get very positive feedback for having taught git. I have gone through a few iterations with this topic, and have found that stripping down the initial instructions to an absolute minimum works best. All those fancy box diagrams are actively harmful to beginners.

maceurt 8y ago
I don't know if this is true. For me personally I have had to use git for a lot of different projects, but I still don't understand anything besides commit, push, pull, add, and force-push (lol). In my experience you can get away with just learning those commands, but I still don't feel comfortable with git.
- marssaxman 8y ago
  Does anyone really feel comfortable with git? I've been using it for over a decade, in a handful of different organizations, on projects large and small, both at work and for personal projects, and it still feels like a convoluted mess. Its terminology is wildly inconsistent and my mental model of its behavior remains stubbornly full of fog. I have a library of recipes committed to memory, but I still don't really understand it, and sorting out what's gone wrong when things inevitably go wrong remains challenging.
probinso 8y ago
I found that running workshops was the most effective way to teach git. I wrote a set of tools against the github api to spin-up and manage a large number of repositories and students in a way that would result in merge conflicts (and doesn't require knowledge of any programming language). https://github.com/probinso/ABC https://github.com/probinso/ABC

maceurt 8y ago

I don't know if this is true. For me personally I have had to use git for a lot of different projects, but I still don't understand anything besides commit, push, pull, add, and force-push (lol). In my experience you can get away with just learning those commands, but I still don't feel comfortable with git.

marssaxman 8y ago
Does anyone really feel comfortable with git? I've been using it for over a decade, in a handful of different organizations, on projects large and small, both at work and for personal projects, and it still feels like a convoluted mess. Its terminology is wildly inconsistent and my mental model of its behavior remains stubbornly full of fog. I have a library of recipes committed to memory, but I still don't really understand it, and sorting out what's gone wrong when things inevitably go wrong remains challenging.

probinso 8y ago

I found that running workshops was the most effective way to teach git. I wrote a set of tools against the github api to spin-up and manage a large number of repositories and students in a way that would result in merge conflicts (and doesn't require knowledge of any programming language). https://github.com/probinso/ABC https://github.com/probinso/ABC