I think what makes it more confusing is that the inner workings are almost too simple.. so one wonders why there are so many commands etc. Git is basically a l

I think what makes it more confusing is that the inner workings are almost too simple.. so one wonders why there are so many commands etc. Git is basically a linked list (if you have one branch) and a graph (if you have more than one branch). Then all you are really working with are pointers to certain nodes in that graph. In git terminology these nodes are called objects and there are different types of objects such as tree objects and commit objects etc. Objects are compressed with a library called zlib and are stored as files within the .git/objects directory, the file name is the hash of the decompressed object. But, back to the graph and the pointers to certain nodes. A branch itself is nothing more than a pointer either. You can look at the files in .git/refs/heads to see where they point. Now, what you do with git checkout is changing the node you currently view in the graph. If you make a commit you create a new node. Merging is nothing more than taking two nodes and creating a new node that is connected to both of them. The main problem i think is that concepts like branch, tag, commit etc are actually just overcomplicated abstractions of the much simpler graph nodes and pointers and are thus confusing.