I have a whole "Git" category on my http://DailyTechVideo.com/ site, which are some of my favorite intros to Git.
Of these, my particular favorite is Michael Schwern’s “Git for ages 4 and up." Watch this, and suddenly Git will make a ton of sense. Jessica Kerr's talk about Git is a close second; it's remarkable for telling us about how Git thinks about things without showing any code.
One of my favorite tools to use in my Git course is this site:
which graphically shows what happens when you commit vs. change branches vs. rebase. Super cool stuff.
If you go through the two of these, and if you understand them, I think that you'll have about 90% of what you need to then re-read a Git introduction, and have things make sense.
I have to laugh a little at this. You just said, "Go through these 2 tutorials, and try out this tool, and then you'll be able to re-read the introduction and understand it (90%)!" I've learned Source Safe, Perforce, and svn in a matter of hours without having to re-read anything. It's absurd to have to watch 2 tutorials and read an additional book twice to understand something that you should basically already understand. Someone really needs to fix this!
I'm not saying that it's necessarily good that using Git basically requires understanding its data structures. But Git is hard to learn, and often hard to use, and surprises people who use it.
The best solution to this problem, I've found, is for people to learn how Git works. Once that happens, everything else falls into place, and their lives are much easier.
So is it ridiculous that you can only understand the Git documentation and tutorials after you understand the data structures? Yes. But Git isn't going away, and if we want people to succeed with it, then we need to help them to learn it, rather than castigate them for using a tool that they need to use for their work.
