Nice! I also had a tough time understanding the manual on this topic, so I made the following diagrams: http://cmurphycode.github.com/Git-Diagrams/ (Source is on GH, so you can send changes!)

I printed out the get/reset diagram and referred to it a lot when I learned git. I still check it every once in a while, for reassurance :)

Excellent! Yes it seems a bunch of people like to visualise how the repo changes via these sorts of diagrams. http://marklodato.github.com/visual-git-guide/index-en.html has similar stuff.

Hey, those are great! I don't know how I haven't come across those- feels like I've explored every git resource on Google. Maybe I should've used DDG :)

<voice type="robot"> i am dumb. still do not understand </voice>