Learn Git to stop fearing the merge in six weeks
Six weeks of light practice — about 20 minutes a day on one free book, one game, and one visualizer — gets a developer from "git push -f, hope nothing breaks" to confidently branching, merging, and rebasing. Roughly 15 hours total. The point is to stop being scared.
6 weeks · ~15 hours · resolve a merge conflict and rebase cleanly without panic
1.Pro Git, by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub
The official Pro Git book is free, current to modern Git, and considered the canonical text by the Git project itself. Read chapters 1–3 (Getting Started, Basics, Branching). Stop there for now — chapters 4–10 are reference material you will return to. The branching chapter is the one most beginners need most; sit with the diagrams until they make sense.
Free online; $40 paperback from Apress
Pro Git →2.Learn Git Branching
An interactive visual sandbox by Peter Cottle that animates your commits as you type real Git commands. The "Main" and "Remote" exercise tracks together cover branching, merging, rebasing, fast-forwards, cherry-picking, and the dreaded interactive rebase. Forty minutes of this beats four hours of YouTube. Do every level.
Free
Learn Git Branching →3.Oh My Git! plus one real workflow
Oh My Git! is a free desktop game with 44 levels that runs real Git underneath while showing the commit graph in real time. Play through the campaign. Then for one full week, manage a real project — even a notes folder — using a feature-branch workflow: branch, commit, push, open a pull request to yourself on GitHub, merge, repeat. The muscle memory matters more than any concept.
Free
Oh My Git! →If this doesn't fit you
If you only need to push code to GitHub for a single solo project, you do not need this whole path. Learn five commands — clone, add, commit, push, pull — and stop. You can come back when you collaborate with someone. Do not pretend you know Git deeply when you do not; senior developers can tell.
Why this path
Most developers learn Git by accident over years of breaking things, and never form the mental model of commits as a directed graph. Pro Git gives you that model in one chapter; Learn Git Branching turns the model into reflexes; Oh My Git! plus real workflow embeds it. Skipping the visualizer is the most common mistake. Reading about rebase is useless. Watching the pointers move while you type rebase is what makes it stick.