Getting started

• Preface
  • Technical storytelling
  • Thank you for supporting Mercurial
  • Acknowledgments
  • Conventions Used in This Book
  • Using Code Examples
  • Safari® Books Online
  • How to Contact Us
• How did we get here?
  • Why revision control? Why Mercurial?
    • Why use revision control?
    • The many names of revision control
  • About the examples in this book
  • Trends in the field
  • A few of the advantages of distributed revision control
    • Advantages for open source projects
  • The forking non-problem
    • Advantages for commercial projects
  • Why choose Mercurial?
  • Mercurial compared with other tools
    • Subversion
    • Git
    • CVS
    • Perforce
    • Choosing a revision control tool
  • Switching from another tool to Mercurial
  • A short history of revision control
• A tour of Mercurial: the basics
  • Installing Mercurial on your system
    • Tortoisehg
    • Atlassian SourceTree
    • Other choices
  • Basic configuration
    • Creating a Mercurial configuration file
    • Choosing a user name
  • Getting started
    • Built-in help
  • Working with a repository
    • Creating your own repository
    • What's in a repository?
    • Adding content to the repository
    • Making a local copy of a repository
  • A tour through history
    • Changesets, revisions, and talking to other people
    • Viewing specific revisions
    • More detailed information
  • All about command options
  • Good commit practices
    • Writing a commit message
    • Writing a good commit message
    • Aborting a commit
    • Admiring our new handiwork
  • Sharing changes
    • Pulling changes from another repository
    • Updating the working directory
    • Pushing changes to another repository
    • Default locations
    • Sharing changes over a network
  • Conclusion