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Frame from Introduction to Git with Scott Chacon of GitHub Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Introduction to Git with Scott Chacon of GitHub

16 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
3 HN users recommended this talk3 months2012–2016 score 4
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN commenters keep recommending it as the best video for newcomers who want to understand how Git works technically.

Scott Chacon introduces Git by showing what happens under the hood for basic commands: staging, committing, data storage, branching, merging and pushing. He contrasts it with Subversion and shows history viewing with log.

“This is the video that I keep recommending to new people who want to know how it works on a technical level.” (HN, 2016)

2 strong recommendations · 1 recommendations · Talks · intro

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@jzl Nov 2016 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Ask HN: Is there a “ground-up” explanation of PGP/GnuPG?
Scott Chacon's videos are priceless. (He's the co-author of the git book.) They explain exactly how git works internally in the simplest terms possible. Either or both of these: Introduction to Git - talk by Scott Chacon [link] Introduction to Git with Scott Chacon of GitHub [this video] The latter is newer but a bit longer. Don't be fooled by the video names, these are introductions to the internals not just the interface.
Explains how git works internally in simplest terms.
@kwe Dec 2016 Strongly recommends
on HN thread A Git catastrophe cleaned up
This is the video that I keep recommending to new people who want to know how it works on a technical level. I've always had amazing/euphoric feedback to that recommendation. [this video]
Recommended to newcomers wanting a technical grasp of Git.
@grannyg00se Jul 2012 Recommends
on HN thread Got 15 minutes and want to learn Git?
Read more
A lot of these Git tutorials seem to walk you through a series of commands as if knowing the commands is knowing Git. I think they should focus on scenarios instead. Short stories like: "Bob's code is working well but he wants to try something that might be completely misguided. He knows better than to mess with his working code....." Then at the end of the story a command is introduced. Also, some kind of indication of what Git is actually doing when you issue that command. When you tell Git to branch, what actually happens to the file system? When you say git status, what is it actually looking at? And please, don't start a tutorial on Git without introducing the three area paradigm (working, staging/index, commit) Here's a talk by Scott Chacon of GitHub. [this video] It's over an hour long and very detailed.
Long, detailed talk on how Git works.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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