Teaching materials for scientists

[Greg Ward]

Hi all --

I seem to have volunteered to teach a bunch of physics grad students
and postdocs the basics of version control with Mercurial. Do you know
about any teaching materials I can "borrow" to get started? I suspect
the audience differs from programmers in several ways:

  * might never even heard of version control, never mind used it

  * doesn't really care about the craft of writing maintainable
    software -- the hook is more likely to be "get back the code that
    worked last week, collaborate easily with your buddy/supervisor,
    have an offsite backup"

  * more likely to put giant binary data files into version control
    rather than giant binary dependencies or build outputs...
    it's still wrong, but differently wrong ;-)

  * might be tempted to put small textual analysis results under
    version control, which I strongly suspect is wrong

BTW, any tips/ideas/insights into teaching Mercurial to scientists
would be welcome.

Thanks!

       Greg
-- 
Greg Ward                            http://www.gerg.ca
<greg at gerg.ca>                       @gergdotca