InfoQ
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2012–2016
1:22:12 · 396K views · Jul 27, 2011
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.
HN commenters keep recommending it as the best video for newcomers who want to understand how Git works technically.
3 comments from Hacker News
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.
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
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.