[adambard]

Off-topic from the theme of your post, if you really want to learn about git, you could take the path that I did, which was to go by way of Mercurial (otherwise known as hg).

Hg is simpler than git in many ways. There's no "staging" for changes, so "commit" is just taking a snapshot of your files as they are right now. Simple.

And, since it's so simple, that means that you can write a really good tutorial for it, which Joel Spolsky did: http://hginit.com/01.html

Hg is plenty useful in its own right, and it doesn't really deserve to be training wheels for git as I've presented it here. But moving from hg to git is really easy; it makes git just seem like hg with a bunch more features.