I can't help but feel that Git has completely missed the forest through the trees that you can make a 30+ part guide explaining how to use it.
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Commits are snapshots of a tree. They have a list of ancestors (usually, but not always, just one). Tags are named pointers to a commit that don't change. Branches are named pointers to a commit that do change. The index is a tiny proto-commit still in progress that you "add" to before committing.
There. That's git. Want to know more? Don't read the guide, just google "how to I switch to a specific git commit without affecting my tree?", or "how do I commit only some of my changed files?", or "how to I copy this commit from another place into my current tree?".
The base abstractions are minimalist and easy. The things you want to do with them are elaborate and complicated. Learn the former, google the latter. Don't read guides.
This is about as useful as "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors."
It's basically a lot of words which make zero sense for a user starting to use git -- even if it happens to be the most succinct explanation once they've understood git.
> The base abstractions are minimalist and easy. The things you want to do with them are elaborate and complicated. Learn the former, google the latter.
You can't really learn the former -- you can't even see it till you've experienced it for a while. The typical user groks what it means after that experience. Correction, actually: the typical user simply gives up in abject frustration. The user who survived many months of using a tool they don't understand might finally be enlightened about the elegant conceptual model of git.