Jonas Bernoulli, the maintainer of Magit, has a nice post entitled A
walk through the Magit interface. It discusses the most-used Magit
features and how to access them through Magit’s interface. All that
information is in the documentation, of course, but if slogging
through the whole manual is too daunting, Bernoulli’s post is just the
thing to get you started.
Actually, using Magit is pretty intuitive and the popup menus help you
along if you get stuck. Still, there are some general procedures that
aren’t obvious from the menus. For example, pressing
Return on a commit in the status buffer
(or a log) will bring up the entire commit. Similarly, you can display
a diff in most contexts by typing dd.
I really like the section on committing parts of a file. Most people
know you can commit a diff hunk but Magit makes it much easier than
raw Git. Magit also allows you to commit part of a hunk so you can
have a very granular commit if you need it. Check out the post for the
details.
Magit, along with Org mode, is generally considered one of the killer
apps for Emacs. This post will give you an idea of why that’s true for
Magit.