GIT SHOULDN'T BE SO HARD TO LEARN.

When you're just getting started, something as straightforward as a merge can be terrifying. It can take a long time to really become comfortable using some of Git's more advanced features. (It took me a year or two.)

Once people achieve some level of Git enlightenment, they tend to make statements of the form 'Git gets a lot easier once you realize X' -- but that doesn't do much for people staring up Git's steep learning curve.

My goal with this site is to help you, Dear Reader, understand what those smug bastards are talking about.

En bra video för dig som vill lära dig versionshanteringssystemet Git:

Update 2011-10-07: SourceTree is good enough that it gradually displaced all other git clients. Developer Steve Streeting was productive and responsive, churning out stable improvements. This week, Atlassian (maker of JIRA and other stuff) announced that they had acquired SourceTree (and Steve Streeting). That is probably good news, because it means more resources behind ST. Even better, SourceTree is now free "for a limited time". So now there is really no reason not to get the best git client for Mac.

Version Control
Everything you need to get started with Subversion or Git.

This is a tutorial on the Git version control system.

Git is quickly becoming one of the most popular version control systems in use. There are plenty of tutorials on Git already. How is this one different?

A Story

When I first started using Git, I read plenty of tutorials, as well as the user manual. Though I picked up the basic usage patterns and commands, I never felt like I grasped what was going on “under the hood,” so to speak. Frequently this resulted in cryptic error messages, caused by my random guessing at the right command to use at a given time. These difficulties worsened as I began to need more advanced (and less well documented) features.

After a few months, I started to understand those under-the-hood concepts. Once I did, suddenly everything made sense. I could understand the manual pages and perform all sorts of source control tasks. Everything that seemed so cryptic and obscure now was perfectly clear.

Understanding Git

The conclusion I draw from this is that you can only really use Git if you understand how Git works. Merely memorizing which commands you should run at what times will work in the short run, but it’s only a matter of time before you get stuck or, worse, break something.

It's a land rush of revision control, I tell ya! Among the stable of eager candidates for best-loved DVCS, Git and Mercurial seem to be the two tools capturing the most programmer heart-share for now.

Git is admired because Linus Torvalds wrote it, but Mercurial is better because he didn't.