[etjossem]

I agree with this. For many people who are learning Git for the first time, it's also their first experience with contributing code to a repository at all.

The last thing you want to do is turn them off entirely, or gatekeep the profession to exclude people who aren't good at reading dense documentation.

The best way to teach git is to get them comfortable with "Add, Commit, and Push" and then explain what's happening at each stage.

[darkpuma]

Despite using CVS and SVN for years, I was never truly comfortable with either. When I first learned git, it was like a breath of fresh air. Suddenly the VCS was behaving in predictable ways. Yet I'd put off learning git for two or three years because everybody was telling me "git is so much more confusing than subversion." I shouldn't have listened to them, and they shouldn't have said that!

Maybe if somebody has already mastered subversion then git will confuse them a lot, but I'm not convinced even that is necessarily true. Regardless, it seems clear to me that novice users shouldn't be told that git is complicated.