If I am not mistaken, Emacs maintainance has been passed on to Lars (the author of Gnus). In any case, John is a great person involved in a lot of interesting free software. He conceived ledger (a cli double-accounting tool) and wrote a lot of emacs packages, amongst other things. Big Up to johnw!
Back at my first internship circa 2011 or so, we had a developer advocate from GitHub come to the company for a workshop day. He was great. He taught git just like this, and by the end of the day I had a solid understanding of the tool. That background knowledge has remained extremely useful.
Git from the Bottom Up (2009) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10199391 - Sept 2015 (25 comments)
Git from the Bottom-Up by John Wiegley [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059614 - Jan 2011 (8 comments)
Git from the bottom up [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1099229 - Feb 2010 (18 comments)
Git==Blobs+Trees+Commits+nothingelse Learn Git from the bottom up - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1064231 - Jan 2010 (2 comments)