git clarity

I once got the advice to read Pro Git in this chapter order: 10, then 1–9. As opposed to 1–10.

I like that the book has these two routes through it and has put care into both.

There is a certain personality type for whom this works much better, who get confused by flailing around and not knowing what’s actually going on. The “waiddaminute here…” types. People who clean their sink with baking soda and soap. Git is simple and neat and good.♥︎

(Unlike GitHub.)

Some people (like me) have an easier time understanding

Nick Farina - Git Is Simpler Than You Think

than

git - the simple guide - no deep shit!

and for others it’s the other way around.

I don’t know how to drive so the following analogy is fraught but some people need to learn a car from the engine first and others need to learn it from the steering wheel first.

Now, if your takeaway from what I’m writing here is “oh, wow, such-and-such approach to learning git sounds much cooler and the other way sounds like it’s for noobs” (regardless of which you think is which) then I’ve done a bad job; I’m trying to present both ways as legit, but well suited for different kindsa people.

The opposite of saying that one side is an untalented noob and the other isn’t. Instead, y’all are gonna end up with the whole picture, it’s just a question of where you need to start for the learning experience to make sense to you.

Follow-ups

From

Flexibeast and

JBanana and

Sotiris

Sotiris writes:

> I wholeheartedly agree, before starting to learn something a general overview of what it is, what it can do, what it’s useful for, is needed. One great example of this is in my opinion “The AWK Programming Language” (1988) by A. V. Aho, B. W. Kernighan and P. J. Weinberger.

>

> These are the book’s very first sentences:

>

> [...]

>

> Within the first four sentences you learn [...]

How the heck can it be pre-book–learning if it’s literally in the actual book?

Please let me clarify how chapter ten of Pro Git is very different from chapter ten of some other rando nerd book. I was literally written to be the first chapter but they were convinced to move it because it was too “engine” and they expected a lot of “steering wheel” readers. It has introductory stuff:

> Git is fundamentally a content-addressable filesystem with a VCS user interface written on top of it. You’ll learn more about what this means in a bit.

It goes on to start a tutorial with git init, but one that is way more low-level and hash-object and update-ref than chapter 1. And some of us leqrn better from that direction. We’re like flour and yeast and water before you show us a toaster. I made a point above how engine-first learners aren’t cooler than stearing-wheel–first learners, but, please, that has to go both ways. Just because you understood “git add” and “git commit” and “git fetch” without knowing the underlying data model doesn’t make your experience universal.

Literally the first time I saw Emacs the tutorial explained cons, car and cdr. Maybe that’s why I stuck with it. I started engine first.