This may be a backwards way to go about it, especially with an end goal of learning Git, but I feel that having learned Mercurial first helped me to more easily

This may be a backwards way to go about it, especially with an end goal of learning Git, but I feel that having learned Mercurial first helped me to more easily move to Git. Ultimately, it was using BitBucket's Mercurial repositories, and then Atlassian stating they were discontinuing Mercurial that forced me to jump to Git. Wanting to keep my Mercurial history forced me to learn parts of Git that I otherwise probably never would have touched. It seems Git has (at least for the present and near future) won the SCM wars for popularity. Working with mostly front end developers unfamiliar with code tools made me the go to guy at work, so I had no choice but to learn as much as I could about handling conflicts, as well as things most people rarely think about like a project's .gitignore and .gitattributes