How do I use Mercurial?

I'm assuming Mercurial is for having an updated website and it archiving the old stuff? Easy to test things and such?

My question is, how exactly should I get started and can somebody give me a crash course in using Mercurial and using the following techs below:

Notepad++ for coding
FTP
PHP/MySQL
Jquery & other js libraries

I use windows and would like to keep things fairly simple. I'm developing 1 website currently and want some kind of CVS system in place. Or should I just stick to my current edit file in notepad++ and upload via ftp method and make a backup c开发者_运维知识库opy of everything every once and a while?

Any thoughts?

EDIT: I'm doing http://bugtracker.gttools.com/public/wiki/bluehost/Mercurial right now in order to try and 'install' it.

I'd definitely recommend taking a read through the excellent HGinit http://hginit.com/ site in addition to the official guide.

Definitely try and move across to using some form of version control (SVN, git or mercurial) as it'll save you down the line.

Mercurial is a distributed version control system, much like Git but allegedly slightly simpler.

A good tutorial by Joel Spolsky can be found here.

If you read up on https://www.mercurial-scm.org/guide under Basic Workflow you should be able to figure out how to work with it while editing files using Notepad++ etc.

From your question it sounds like you don't know much about version control (like you have a very basic grasp of what it is and why it is useful). So perhaps the first thing you should do is read up on that in general first of all.

But in terms of using Mercurial I don't think you will find a better insight into how to use it and why it is so good than Joel's tutorial, which you can find here hginit Tutorial

HGInit is a good tutorial for mercurial. Basically you have to hg init in the directory you want to be under version control. If you don't like the command line, you can also use gui tools, like tortoisehg.

If I'm not mistaken you also want to upload the latest version to the website. If I'm right ftp access won't be enough for this (unless you define a post-commit hook, that uploads the directory using ftp).

I'm assuming Mercurial is for having an updated website and it archiving the old stuff? Easy to test things and such?

Not sure what you mean here. Mercurial (and all version control systems) lets you archive your changes as you make them, label and manage your releases so you can track code that goes together, and branch when you need to do parallel development.

You should be checking in your changes as you make them. If anything goes wrong during development, you can roll back to the last good version you had. It's a great way to make sure that you don't lose days and days of work because you forgot to check in.

Check in early, check in often.