Is there a good guide to starting out with Mercurial?

Question

I'm looking for a good tutorial for Mercurial.

Answer 1

Joel Spolsky just wrote a good one.

Answer 2

There is an official tutorial from Mercurial: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Tutorial

Answer 3

http://hgbook.red-bean.com/

Answer 4

My choices (I've just went over this.. :-), some of them have been mentioned already:

If you come from Subversion:

• Mercurial for SVN users: http://wiki.pylonshq.com/display/pylonscookbook/Mercurial+for+Subversion+Users

Some starting points:

• A very practical task-oriented page: Mercurial for Beginners: The Definitive Practical Guide: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1170338/mercurial-for-beginners-the-definitive-practical-guide
• The Mercurial official wiki: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Mercurial
• Mercurial: The Definitive Guide in HTML: http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/
• Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial: http://hginit.com/

For after the initiation:

• Tips (simple ones) from http://hgtip.com/tips/
• A Guide to Branching in Mercurial: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-mercurial/

I would particularly advice to start with both the wiki and pages such as "hg init", playing in a local area, cloning from one machine to another w/o any central server, etc. and also the long and detailed page from here (Mercurial for Beginners) which is very oriented towards manipulation. Mercurial is very easy to apprehend, actually even easier than svn (because you don't need a server to start playing). Then there are some more powerful (thus more difficult) notions of course, but the learning curve is not steep.

Hope it'll help.

Cheers,
Christophe.

= The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it --Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) =