Better SCM Initiative : Mercurial

Note about Relevance

As of 2018, this site has become mostly irrelevant.

Homepage

http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/

Summary

Mercurial is one of the two distributed SCM projects that were started in response to the end of the availability of BitKeeper to open source projects. It was designed with the intention of being small, easy to use, and highly scalable.

Although Mercurial was initially taken up by a subset of the Linux kernel development community, it has since seen wider use both by open source projects and companies.

The primary strengths of Mercurial are its simplicity and speed. Even though it has a very different conceptual model than CVS and Subversion, its command line interface is similar enough that picking it up just takes a few minutes. Because it was targeted specifically for work on large repositories, Mercurial is in many cases the fastest SCM tool available.

Resources for Learning

Mercurial: The Definitive Guide - a comprehensive book about Mercurial.
A Tutorial on Using Mercurial - on the Mercurial wiki.
Hg Init - a Mercurial Tutorial by Joel Spolsky.