Welcome to Mercurial: The Definitive Guide

This is the online home of the book “Mercurial: The Definitive Guide”. It was published in 2009 by O'Reilly Media.

Mercurial is a fast, lightweight source control management system designed for easy and efficient handling of very large distributed projects. My book tells you what it is, why you should care, and how you can use it effectively.

Read it online

I make the content freely available online: you can read it here. If you like it, please buy a copy!

For news updates, please visit my blog. You should follow me on Twitter here.

How to buy

If you like the book, please support the work of the Software Freedom Conservancy (see below) by buying a copy.

You should contribute!

I publish the source code for this book as a Mercurial repository. Please feel welcome to clone it, make modifications to your copy, and send me changes. Getting a copy of the source takes just a few seconds if you have Mercurial installed:

hg clone http://bitbucket.org/bos/hgbook

The online version of the book includes a comment system that you can use to send feedback involving errors, omissions, and suggestions.

(If you would like to adapt the comment system for a publishing project of your own, the source for the web application is included with the book source at the link above.)

How I help Mercurial and free software, and you can too

Mercurial is a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a wonderful non-profit organisation that offers its member projects legal and administrative advice.

I donate my royalties from the sales of this book to the Software Freedom Conservancy, and I encourage you to support their work, too.

The SFC can accept accept donations (tax-free under IRS 501(c)(3), within the United States) on behalf of its member projects. If you would like to support Mercurial directly, please consider making a donation to the SFC on its behalf.

If you would like to help free software developers to provide their important public services without being impeded by legal issues, please consider donating to the SFC's sister organisation, the Software Freedom Law Center.