Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion Review
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As the guys behind the Pragmatic Starter Kit Series admit, these books cover basic stuff all developers should know. So it comes as no surprise that Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion is not a ground-breaking, earth shattering book. It's a good, thin, easy to read book that covers the basics of version control and how to work with Subversion. It spends fewer than 20 pages on the basics with the rest of the book covering syntax, setup, and best practices for Subversion. (Check out the CVS version of this book if you're using CVS.) An appendix of "recipes" (which could have been organized better) covers over 60 operations with a quick summary of the commands required for each and a pointer to the section of the book where it was covered. Some of the recipes are simple things that you tend to do from your IDE plug-in or TortoiseSVN or other client, but many are more involved. This is very helpful, because many tasks are infrequently performed, and you can spend a lot of time (in other books) searching for where a topic was covered.

I found the book very helpful in getting Subversion installed with Apache for HTTP-based use (through firewalls) in just a few minutes and also for local use on a USB flash drive (with file-based URLs) as well as for organizing my repository. When the time comes, I will refer back to their "recipes" for dealing with release issues. I would not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone using or considering using Subversion.

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