I use git on a daily basis. Not to age myself, but I went from rcs to cvs to svn to git, with some Perforce and SourceSafe sprinkled in there, so I have a long background in source control. But git is just different enough to throw me sometimes. And for whatever reason, a lot of git documentary gets a bit, well, academic. It’s hard to find a quick answer sometimes, and they’re often buried in very theoretical arguments about whether or not git submodules are essential or the worst thing since Agent Orange.

Anyway, here’s my go-to for answers when I break something: http://sethrobertson.github.io/GitFixUm/fixup.html

There are two things I like about this page. First, it gives you answers without a lot of guff. Less is more, etc.

The second thing is that it’s presented as a choose-your-own-adventure. Are you trying to do this? Did you do this? Do you want to do this? It’s a simple troubleshooting flowchart, something I’ve written in docs before, and something you’ll run into every time you call tech support. (There it gets a bad rap because the first steps are always “did you try restarting?” and that seems insulting. It’s also the problem 90% of the time. That’s another topic, though.)

But as a kid who grew up devouring Bantam books from the book fair at my grade school, and memorizing _The Cave of Time _way back then, there’s something very intuitive and appealing about this form of docs. I’m not going to say this makes a git branching disaster where you think you lost everything fun, but it makes it easier to drill through the problem and find a solution. I don’t really have any docs at work where I could pull something like this, but as docs in general become more informal and user-oriented, this would be a great format to use.