Customer Reviews

Mercurial: The Definitive Guide

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

One of the strong points about Mercurial is that you don't need a book like this to get started. But you'll want it anyway; there are subtleties to using Mercurial that you're not likely to figure out without some help. The author also makes a compelling argument for distributed source control in general, and Mercurial in particular. If you're trying to make a decision about choosing a source control system, you make well find his argument persuasive; I did.

I learned how to use Mercurial from this book. My only beef is the confusing use of the term "repository" in this book. Sometimes it's used to mean the .hg metadata directory, sometimes it means the whole directory of your project, which includes the .hg directory. It would have been less confusing to just use the term ".hg directory" when talking about the .hg directory! Maybe it's a Mercurial thing.
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Edited Dec. 30, 2011:
I discovered the online document "Understanding Mercurial" that uses the following 3 terms in a consistent manner: the repo, the working directory, and the store. This consistent use of terminology really helps clearing up the picture. I wish this book could have adopted such consistent use of the terms.

I mostly work on MS Windows, and I like Linux. I know there is a tradition of command-line interfaces. But they are more difficult to learn. I found TortoiseHG, which is a GUI for Mercurial. And so far it has been a life saver. I have used the book mostly as reference. And I have not come up with very difficult situations. So in that respect the book has not been as useful as the graphical interface. I do recommend using Mercurial.

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.