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I do love this and it's great for understanding how git works because it's a really cool design. But I'm not convinced this is necessary or sufficient for learn

I do love this and it's great for understanding how git works because it's a really cool design. But I'm not convinced this is necessary or sufficient for learning how to use or be effective with git. The way git stores commits---as blobs and hashes etc---is a really good abstraction. That means you just don't need to know this. You can think of a commit as being a complete copy of your working directory that is identifiable by its hash. That's it. You can then think of branches and tags as labels for those commits, mutable and immutable, respectively. This gets you pretty far in effective use of git. But the details are cool. Just don't go teaching any of this in a beginner developer course on git.

gjvc 3y ago
But the details are cool. Just don't go teaching any of this in a beginner developer course on git. I would think that mentioning the big-picture concepts at the outset, and revealing the details as the need arises is an effective pedagogical model. On the other hand, the minestrone of git terminology which the user is forced to learn and get comfortable with a priori (and moreover which has been used ambiguously in blog posts and whatnot) [1] make the learning curve much steeper than it should be. Everyone learns differently, that's for sure. I remember my experience learning git from scratch was particularly scrappy, until I sat down for a few hours and read the "Pro Git" book. [1] staging and index