Chris Belanger. Git Apprentice. Virginia, Razeware LLC., 2020.

There are usually two reasons a person picks up a book about Git: one, they are unusually curious about how the software works at a deeper level; or two, they're frustrated and need something to solve their problems now. Whatever situation brought you here, welcome! I'm happy to have you onboard. I came to write this book for both of the above reasons. I am a tinkerer and hacker by nature, and I love going deep into the internals of software to see what makes them tick. But I, like you, found Git at first to be an inscrutable piece of software. My brain, which had been trained in software development through the late 1990s, found version control packages like SVN soothing, with their familiar client-server architecture, Windows shell integration, and rather straightforward, albeit heavy, processes. When I came to use Git and GitHub about seven years ago, I found it inscrutable at best; it seemed no matter which way I turned, Git was telling me I had a merge conflict, or it was merging changes from the master branch into my current branch, or quite often complaining about unstaged changes. And why was it called a "pull request", when clearly I was trying to push my changes into the master branch? Little by little, I learned more about how Git worked; how to solve some of the common issues I encountered, and I eventually got to a point where I felt comfortable using it on a daily basis.