Git for Humans

this book prompted me to re-acquaint myself with a word: “grok.” To grok something is to understand it intuitively, down to its bones. The term comes from a Robert Heinlein book, it turns out.

“Git for Humans” took me a step closer to grokking Git. Lots of tutorial books are of the “insert tab A into slot B” variety, but this book somehow threads that wonderful line between something both practical and readable. It discusses Git, certainly, but also waxes almost philosophically on the nature of state, change, and collaboration.

The book helped me understand deep concepts behind Git. Concepts that make Git not complex, but actually quite simple. It gave me some practical knowledge, but that wasn’t what I really needed. I needed to Grok it. It’s a short book, but just as long as it needs to be.

I still don’t quite know how the book did it. But as a published technical author myself, I put the book down and thought, “Damn, that’s how I should be writing.” And there’s something to that.