Not to undermine author’s efforts, but I feel we as an industry took a wrong turn somewhere. An entire book on what essentially is a single Git command is just insane.
> I feel we as an industry took a wrong turn somewhere
Git is a powerful yet complex (and sometimes confusing) tool. But imho people that are using Git every single day and yet not willing to invest some time to learn the fundamentals properly (because it's "just" a VCS) is the real issue here. It's especially difficult for people coming from other VCSs (like SVN or Mercurial). I was there once. I would probably still have the same attitude, if I didn't win a 2-day Git workshop a few years ago, which completely changed my mental model and made "advanced features" appear quite simple.
This fact (people learning commit/push/pull and moving on) creates the market for such books. "You don't want to spend 2 days on (re-)learning Git? Here's one major feature explained that you should know".
1. "The average dev these days is so terribly uninformed, they're willing to buy an entire book to explain what, to me, is a simple concept. I feel like devs these days aren't as good."
Or:
2. "Our tools these days are so complex that the average dev needs an entire book just to understand a single command. I feel like our tools are too complicated."
You might want to work on being clearer about what you mean in the future, or else risk coming off as rude. I thought you meant #1 when I first read your statement, but, after rereading your statement, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you meant #2.
To respond to point #2: imagine explaining a complex bash command to someone. If they mostly used bash to change directories and list files, you might need to explain pipes, buffers, and the unix philosophy before they'd really understand it. As someone in this thread mentioned, they mostly use git for push/pull/merge and that's not uncommon. Most devs need more background about how git works behind the scenes in order to really get the benefits of something like git rebase. I happen to be one of those devs and I'm glad a book like this exists.
I understand this reaction. And just like you've pointed out, it's actually not a whole" book about a single command.
In order to get a good understanding of rebasing, I believe it's good to have a solid foundation of how git works, which is pretty much what the first half of the book covers.
I could've left that out and only talk about rebasing without going into all the other topics but then, for someone who isn't experienced with the internals of git will have a hard time following what's going on.
Git is a powerful yet complex (and sometimes confusing) tool. But imho people that are using Git every single day and yet not willing to invest some time to learn the fundamentals properly (because it's "just" a VCS) is the real issue here. It's especially difficult for people coming from other VCSs (like SVN or Mercurial). I was there once. I would probably still have the same attitude, if I didn't win a 2-day Git workshop a few years ago, which completely changed my mental model and made "advanced features" appear quite simple.
This fact (people learning commit/push/pull and moving on) creates the market for such books. "You don't want to spend 2 days on (re-)learning Git? Here's one major feature explained that you should know".