git-internals-pdf VS git-from-the-bottom-up

For me the Peepcode Git Internals book was a great peek under the hood. I went from "Git has a lot of magical incantations" to "Git is pretty simple and I could probably build a version of it".

I generally recommend the Peepcode Git Internals book. The first half explains the internals of how Git works, and the second half is a command reference.

Once you get the hang of basic Git operations, you should look into how Git works under the hood. Git Internals helped me a lot on this.

I often recommend the Peepcode Git Internals book. The first half talks about how Git works internally. The second half is a "how to use Git" tutorial. I think understanding the internals (which aren't really that complicated) can really help to demystify Git.

Conceptually, Git's not really all that complicated. I always recommend people to read the Peepcode Git Internals book (originally $9, now free): https://github.com/pluralsight/git-internals-pdf/blob/master/drafts/peepcode-git.pdf

Check out this page if you haven't yet (alternatively, direct link to the PDF.) I hear it's all good, but the Understanding Git chapter is the one I'd specifically point you to.

Here's a great walk through for how Git works from the bottom up: https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/

It's short, easy to understand and you'll understand HEAD.

Very tangential:

Gerrit also stores some of its configs in a git repo. I was setting up a new instance, but couldn't get Admin permissions because the way my auth front-end didn't play well with the docker image's assumptions.

Gerrit already does a lot of its work via non-standard references. For example, you don't push to a branch, `refs/branches/foo`, you push to a separate `refs/for/foo` namespace that creates the review.

Similarly, Group config is stored in the All-Users git repo [1], but in references created after a UUID, in `refs/groups/UU/UUID`.

I ended up having a to exercise the plumbiest of plumbing commands [2] to create a new commit from scratch (from a tree, from the index, from blobs), to update the group ref to add myself to the Administrators group (this, of course, requires a local shell and permissions on the Gerrit host). It was a great way to exercise what I had learned in Git from the Bottom Up [3]

[1] https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/config-...

[2] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects

[3] https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/

I found Git from the Bottom Up helpful. It is very short as well. Then refer to the official book when you want more detail.

I recently came across "Git from the Bottom Up by John Wiegley" (thanks to Coding Blocks podcast), he has a chapter about rebasing: https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/1-Repository/7-branching-and-the-power-of-rebase.html

You won't have to put your entire life on break in order to understand the fundamentals of git and why it works the way it works. Going through https://jwiegley.github.io/git-from-the-bottom-up/ and really understanding the material will take you a couple of hours at max, but will save you a lot of time in the future.

Wanting to understand things before using them is hardly elitism, not sure why you would think that.

Just like you probably don't want to fix bugs without understand the cause, it's hard to use a tool correctly unless you know how the tool works.