Source code management should be simple--that is, a well-oiled central mechanism for managing code contributions from one or more developers working on a single software development project. In this book, Joel Spolsky and Bill von Hagen teach you how to use Mercurial to simplify the maintenance of multiple versions of a software project, and include the art of migrating improvements from one version of the software to another. Source code management systems must be network-aware, secure, and powerful without sacrificing usability. Mercurial is all of these things, which is why it is one of the most popular open source code management systems in use today. OpenSolaris, Symbian, and the Python programming language project all use Mercurial. This book demonstrates how Mercurial supports both local and networked development projects, and how to take advantage of its excellent scaling capabilities. This book shows how to work on Windows and Linux, and leads developers to Mercurial mastery. Teaches how to use the Mercurial source code control system in both tutorial and task-oriented chapters Delivers the complete spectrum of information necessary to use and customize Mercurial, including information for Mercurial repository maintainers and a complete reference for all the Mercurial commands Discusses both command-line and graphical tools for working with Mercurial projects, and also discusses how to migrate existing projects from the likes of Subversion, Git, and Bazaar to Mercurial What you'll learn Understand the key concepts that differentiate Mercurial from other source code management systems (e.g., Subversion or Git). Create, manage, and share development projects via Mercurial repositories. Perform common operations such as adding new files and directories to your projects, committing updated versions of those files, and retrieving files that have been updated by other users. Perform advanced operations such as creating branches, tagging revisions, merging changesets, and resolving merge conflicts. Integrate Mercurial with popular integrated development environments (IDEs) such as Eclipse and Visual Studio. Customize Mercurial to suit your workflow, software engineering practices, and user preferences. Who this book is for This book is designed for beginning-to-intermediate-level software developers who may be new to source code control. Those who are familiar with source code control will find this book a fast and easy-to-understand introduction to Mercurial.