IME the main thing that makes git so hard to understand is the determination to think of it as "distributed subversion" - I find it substantially easier to teac

IME the main thing that makes git so hard to understand is the determination to think of it as "distributed subversion" - I find it substantially easier to teach git to people who've never used a VCS before than to people who have years of experience with SVN/CVS/etc. It can seem a complicated nightmare until you grok how it really works. And if you have preconceptions getting in your way, yes, a book can be a very useful tool to give you that "Aha!" moment. Once you stop someone thinking "It's a log of patches" and make them understand "It's like VM snapshots logged in a linked list" all the weird difficult stuff just Makes Sense.