Many newcomers to git make the mistake of not taking the time to understand what git does, treating git like their old centralized source control system, and getting frustrated by the number of commands they have to remember to work with new concepts like the index (staging area), their local repo, and remote repos.

If you create a model in your head of what git is doing, you’ll be quickly on your way to mastery. Understanding what’s happening under the hood relieves you of the burden of having to memorize commands that seemingly make no sense at the outset. It’s like understanding how a formula is derived instead of memorizing the formula. Once you understand the model, it will become second nature to work with the various parts of your git repository.

Getting the mental model is the key factor when using any version control system.

This post is part of the thread: Version Control – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.