In this case it's a difference in levels of understanding. From the beginning of the article: "I never strongly understood the command beyond the handful of spe

In this case it's a difference in levels of understanding. From the beginning of the article: "I never strongly understood the command beyond the handful of specific use cases that I needed it for." So in that frame of mind git-reset is very simple. "Oh crap, I messed up my working dir and everything's messed up! git-reset --hard!" The purpose of the article though is to improve understanding beyond that and at an intuitive level. It's the difference between saying Bayes Theorem is p(h|e,c) = p(e|h,c)*p(h|c)/p(e|c) and linking to http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=13156 http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=13156 The thing I like about git is that yes, as a whole it's pretty complicated, but it's really not that hard to get up and running quickly especially if you use github. Then it's a gift that keeps on giving as you learn more about it while also becoming more proficient. Kind of like vim in a way, which is notorious for its wall of a learning curve, but if you just want to treat it as a normal text editor you can tell it to start up in insert mode and use gvim, then proceed to learn from there.