[marssaxman]

I use git daily and have done so for years, but it's true that it has been a long time since I've actually tried to understand it. I gave up on the documentation, which seemed to be written in such a way that it would only make sense if you already knew what it was trying to tell you, and just memorized the handful of recipes I need to get my work done. It's not pretty; it's one of the bad tools, which I occasionally have to wrestle with, and not one of the good tools, which fit onto my brain like extensions of my body.

[dlitz]

That's interesting. My experience was the opposite: I've also been using git since 2008, and I find it to be the most intuitive, friction-free VCS that I've ever used.

I think the difference is that I didn't start with the official documentation. I watched a video of an introductory talk given by a local Linux kernel developer. The talk started with an explanation of the underlying data model, and then showed how each command manipulates the underlying data structure and how that's useful for version control.

The talk is a bit long and a bit dry, but to date, it's the best introduction to git that I've ever seen. I highly recommend it:

http://excess.org/article/2008/07/ogre-git-tutorial/