I absolutely agree—although if you do find yourself in a situation where you have to use a command line (like on a remote machine), setting an alias like this is a great fallback (though obviously not for beginners):
[alias]
plog = log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative
Doesn't hold a candle to reviewing on a graphical client, though.
Yeah, true, and you also eventually need to learn enough command line git to understand, e.g., Stack Overflow Q&A and blog posts. There's no substitute for building an understanding of the concepts. But then you can still pick your preferred method to enact what you learn.
Inspired by this conversation, I just configured my local machine and R Studio to use Git/GitHub. I used http://happygitwithr.com/ to guide my setup, and I can happily report that it was much less painful than I thought it would be (@jennybryan 
). Once I set it up, I created my first repo for a class project I am working on. I haven't got much up there yet, but how cool is it that GitHub will automatically render a geojson and toss it on a basemap?!
@dlsweet, how's your Git journey going?
@mfherman Great job! It looks like you're moving right along! 
As for me, I have been skimming http://happygitwithr.com/ and just jumping right in. I just finished putting up my first actual repo which holds an ELO-based prediction model for the NHL! Now, I just need to get it organized with a nice README and integrate using version control into my normal workflow!
