Everyone’s up in arms to embrace distributed version control as the new must-have tool for the developer in the know. Though many people have not yet migrated from Subversion, those that have almost invariably extoll the virtues of their particular choice. But though all of the major DVCS’s have features that set them above the previous generation of centralized systems, none stands head-and-shoulders above the others as Subversion does among the last generation: each of them was designed for a specific purpose, and each of them will serve those with different habits, workflows and development styles differently. Having used both git and Mercurial for the better part of a year, I’ve had the opportunity to compare the two. It saddened me to see a Twitter-based debate flamewar erupt over which is better, so I thought I’d do my best to try and ease the tension – with analogies!

Mercurial is a modern, open source, distributed version control system, and a compelling upgrade from older systems like Subversion. In this user-friendly, six-part tutorial, Joel Spolsky teaches you the key concepts.