[bpatrianakos]

Agreed. I'm like you and I was just committing, branching, and merging but learning nothing while clicking around. I'm glad I know now though because I can totally use a lesson on branching. I think branching in Git is one of the most misunderstood parts of Git. I can't tell you how many times I've almost screwed up a repo because I made some mistake merging branches and not pulling from the correct branch when working on a different machine. To make matters worse, if you use Git to deploy into production, testing, and staging environments like I do you run the risk of pushing development or untested code into production by accident. I know I've definitely pushed code meant only for one branch (or feature) into production without merging with master... it gets confusing but needless to say it didn't take long before things stopped working and I realized my mistake.

Branching is huge, awesome, powerful, but I know I as well as a lot of developers I know could use a good lesson on it.

[alinajaf]

The implementation of branching in git is so fantastically simple (its literally a commit hash in a file, `cat .git/refs/heads/master` if you don't believe me) that it boggles the mind that so many developers have so much issue with it.

[bpatrianakos]

The implementation may be simple but I think what gets people is building a mental model of all your different remotes and branches. If you're working on a single machine this is simple. Add in another remote and it's still simple but adds complexity. Add in 3 remotes, 3 development machiness, and oh say 3 branches and the mental model is hard to juggle. I develop on 3 different machines and even after about 6 months of this setup which is very close to the example I gave I still mess things up because I don't think to check what branch I'm on when I switch machines and pull from the wrong one and other little mistakes like that.

Branching really is a very simple thing to understand but what I think gets people in the end is building a mental model of one's own setup and creating good habits like always running `git status` when sitting down at a new machine to be sure you're on the branch you think you are, always pushing to your main remote before switching machines, and making sure to push to the correct branch in that remote, and so on.