Comment by Skunkleton

Lots of confused beginners in this thread. IMO diagrams, and tutorials, that take this approach to teaching git are the reason people have such a hard time. After learning the very basic commands, the next step is to learn the internal data structure of git at a conceptual level. This may seem like a bad design to some, and that is a reasonable thing to debate. It doesn’t change the reality that knowing basic git internals makes git much easier to use.