Ned, much thanks for putting this together, a nice brief overview. What struck me about all of the mercurial tutorials I saw was that they assume your first operation will be to clone an existing repository. That makes sense for many use cases, but I always wanted to start by creating a new repository instead of using an existing.

It might be worthwhile to create another version of the tutorial that walks through the steps starting with creating a new repository, discussing whether you'd do 'truck', etc, as you would with subversion, preferred methods for exposing the repository (ssh, http, ...), security considerations, and so forth. I've been meaning to do it myself, but since you're on a roll ;-)

Yes, you are right, there are other useful threads that could be followed. I tried very hard not to do too much with this tutorial, since it could easily have grown to large to ever get done...