This instructive book takes you step by step through ways to track, merge, and manage both open source and commercial software projects with Mercurial, using Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, and other systems. Mercurial is the easiest system to learn when it comes to distributed revision control. And it's a very flexible tool that's ideal whether you're a lone programmer working on a small project, or part of a huge team dealing with thousands of files. Mercurial permits a countless variety of development and collaboration methods, and this book offers several concrete suggestions to get you started. This guide will help you:

• Learn the basics of working with a repository, changesets, and revisions

• Merge changes from separate repositories

• Set up Mercurial to work with files on a daily basis, including which ones to track

• Get examples and tools for setting up various workflow models

• Manage a project that's making progress on multiple fronts at once

• Find and fix mistakes by isolating problem sources

• Use hooks to perform actions automatically in response to repository events

• Customize the output of Mercurial

Mercurial: The Definitive Guide maintains a strong focus on simplicity to help you learn Mercurial quickly and thoroughly.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 4 Ratings

Good and Useful Book - 2009-10-04
Reviewer Rating:
Mercurial is a really nice, portable, easy to use [which is saying a lot!] source code control system. This is the only paper book available for it. Fortunately, the book very well written, well organized, and nicely developed. The examples actually work and are simple enough, small enough, and complete enough to be useful to type in and work with while reading the book. They make reading the book more of an interactive exercise.

One of the other reviewers gave this book a 2 star rating because there is an incomplete section which sailed past review. He/she doesn't understand the nature of Open Source software development: The book is on line (see below), so if you see something you don't like - don't complain, fix it and share the fix! Ignore that review.

About Mercurial itself: it is the easiest source code control - aka version control, content control, etc - system I've ever used. I started using source code control back with a DOS clone of SCCS, found RCS and switched to that because it was really simple to use [although difficult to organize]. Have also tried CVS and SVN, but kept going back to RCS because of the administrative burden the bigger and better versions impose.

Mercurial makes source code control easy again. Creating and maintaining repositories is inexpensive and easy. Rather than having central repository to maintain and configure, you just type 'hg init; hg add . ; hg ci -m initial-checkin' and you have a brand new repository for whatever project is living in your current directory. To try out something without mangling the basic code, 'cd newdirectory; hg clone repository-directory' and you are now in a clone of the original repository and can hack away. If you like the experiment, you 'hg ci -m like-it; hg push' and it goes back to the main source; if you don't, just delete your trial repository. Rinse and repeat often. It actually makes source code controlled development easy.

So far I haven't found anything in Mercurial I don't like.

Back to the book: the author also maintains the book on line in an editable and comment-able form. See the Mercurial web site at for details about this book and more specialized articles: [...]

It also means that the book is still under continuous development - which is a really good thing for a software reference for an evolving and actively developing system.

Exactly what I look for in a technology book - 2009-08-22
Reviewer Rating:
I'm about half-way through this book. So far, this is exactly the sort of thing I look for in a technology book. The author explains the subject with obvious enthusiasm (so it doesn't drag), there are lots of examples as well as explanations of "how" and "why".

I think this is currently the only book on Mercurial, but it likely will be the only one you need.

Call the editor! - 2009-08-13
Reviewer Rating:
Chapter 14, page 222, under "Cherry-Picking Changes with the transplant Extension" the book reads...

"Need to have a long chat with Brendan about this."

Wow, terrible. How did that get past the editors? Computer books have enough typos as it is, but this is ridiculous!

Software engineering collections will want this - 2009-10-17
Reviewer Rating:
Mercurial: The Definitive Guide offers a step-by-step instructional to tracking, merging and managing open source and commercial software projects using Mercurial in conjunction with Windows, Mac, Linux or other systems. Mercurial is a collaborative system and permits a range of development methods: chapters cover all the software configurations necessary to tweak Mercurial to specific needs, telling how to manage projects on multiple fronts and fix mistakes as well as customizing the program. Software engineering collections will want this.

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