Practical Subversion (Expert's Voice in Open Source) Review

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Practical Subversion (Expert's Voice in Open Source) ReviewThis review comes with a big disclaimer: I'm probably as biased as one can possibly be. Garrett is my peer. We're both core Subversion developers and I already know all of the information presented in the book. One could argue that my bias is overly positive, because I want this book to sell well and make Subversion more popular and successful. On the other hand, one could argue that I'm negatively biased because I have a competing book on the shelf (written with two other co-authors.) Rather than deny the elephant in the room, though, I've embraced it. For the most part, my review is a comparison between the two books. It's the only viewing lens I have.
It's difficult to write a book about Subversion, not because the software is overly complicated but because version control itself is such a complex and messy topic. There are a bunch of contradictory tensions that are hard to resolve:
* Audience: do you write the book for complete newcomers who know nothing at all about version control? Or do you target experienced users who are migrating from other version control systems?
* Learning styles: some people learn best by theoretical overviews, so-called "top down" learning. They start with the theory then eventually work down to specific examples. Others prefer "bottom up" learning, beginning with detailed tutorials and then extrapolating the large picture from that.
* Descriptive vs. Prescriptive: some users want all options laid out for them, so they can decide how they want to work; others prefer to be told how to work so they can get started right away.
What's fascinating is that for each of these tensions, Garrett has moved in the opposite direction from me and my co-authors.
My own book mainly targets people new to version control, with only occasional "asides" to experienced users. This book, however, definitely targets experienced users. Despite the introduction's claims that inexperienced people should be able to "pick up enough to get started", there's really no clear introduction to version control concepts. My gut feeling is that newbies might find this book a bit unfriendly or confusing. On the other hand, this book does a spectactular job of covering "experienced user" topics that I and my co-authors have been criticized for ignoring. There are whole chapters that provide in-depth comparisons between Subversion and other version control systems such as CVS, Perforce, and Visual SourceSafe. And other chapters cover specific migration strategies from these systems to Subversion. If you're an experienced sysadmin tasked with exploring new options for version control, this is definitely the "meat" you've been looking for.
Another big difference between this book and my own is that it heavily favors the "bottom up" learning style. It's full of detailed examples. Chapter 2 is aptly titled a "crash course" in Subversion, whipping through a whole bunch of topics that my own book takes many chapters to lay out. This certainly isn't meant to be taken as a criticism; many people very much prefer this style of presentation, especially experienced folks interested in getting up to speed as quickly as possible.
And finally, Garrett has focused a great deal of energy on telling readers what they *ought* to do, rather than laying out long descriptions of all things that are possible. This book explains Subversion's flexibility, but at the same time makes good recommendations for using Subversion in real-life situations. Version control doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's almost always part of a larger software development process, and impacts that process heavily. This book does a great job of prescribing policies for committing, branching, merging, testing, and releasing.
The book certainly fulfills the promise of its title: it's truly focused on the practical, rather than the theoretical. It ventures into areas that my co-authors and I have deemed "out of bounds" for our own book, but are still incredibly useful -- topics such as intergration with specific IDEs and editors, web-based repository broswers, and build tools.
Bottom line: I'm really impressed by this book. While both books inevitably contain some overlapping content, the overlap is only partial. And the presentation style and overarching goals of the two books are quite different. I think that version control newbies will have an easier time starting with my own book, but then will ultimately be pining for the information in Garrett's book. And experienced version control administrators will almost certainly be happier starting with Garrett's book first. Either way, it seems that both books belong side-by-side on any bookshelf -- the happy dovetailing of both "bottom-up" and "top-down".
Practical Subversion (Expert's Voice in Open Source) OverviewPractical Subversion is a guide to the Subversion (source control management system) version control system. It provides a crash course in how to use Subversion, intended to get the reader up and running as quickly as possible. Beyond the quick-start introduction, the book includes advanced topics such as repository administration, Apache integration, third party tools, migrating revision history from other version control systems, and even accessing the Subversion API's from other programs. This book is based on 1.0 release - which has been in development for about 2 years. Written for the programmer with some experience with an existing version control system (like CVS or Perforce), Practical Subversion explains and demonstrates how to apply that experience in the Subversion environment, which is more simple and better than CVS.Technology Involved:Subversion is an open source project that provides a server and a command-line client. Subversion runs on many flavors of Linux, Mac OS X, and Win32. Subversion is a new system. The current, leading, open source revision control system is CVS. It is hoped that Subversion's improved features will eventually lead to it usurping CVS in the open source world.

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