Learning about Subversion
One of the things I’m learning about for the new job is version control systems. This was something that was on my list of stuff to learn about learn about long before I started at OCLC. Way too many times I’ve overwritten working code and not been able to go back. Also as the development shop grew at UH so did the likelihood that those of us coding would step on each other toes. So I started looking at version control systems CVS, Subversion, Git, etc. Understanding how these systems work on a 10,000 foot level isn’t that difficult, but understand the principles of how one might interact with one of these systems to build open source software are more elusive to me. I’m starting to get my head wrapped around it bit by bit. But I need more information.
So I thought I’d look for a book that would be helpful. The problem is that physical books take time to acquire and ebooks well I’ve complained about my unwillingness to purchase DRM’d device specific ebooks before. What I was hoping for was that Packt Publishing whom I’ve purchased DRM-free ebooks before would have a book that met my needs. Unfortunately the book that looked the most promising was one from O’Reilly and not available at a library nearby. However, in trying to determined if it REALLY had the information I wanted I discovered that a PDF version was freely available. So I was able to get it quickly, consume it in digestible chunks, and not have to purchase the whole thing if I don’t need it. Major thumbs up. Also discovered that I can buy ebooks directly from O’Reilly in a variety of formats that seem to be device independant. Increasingly tempted by thought of an ereader. But also tempted by Safari Tech Books online in order to get access to a variety of tech ebooks. Choices, choices…
You might want to consider skipping subversion, and moving right on to one of the ‘next generation’ distributed version control systems like git. They’re definitely where things are going, give you a lot of advantages over svn, even if you don’t initially use the ‘distributed’ aspect. (Just like svn ‘fixed’ a lot of things that were annoying in cvs).
That book is also known as the Readbean book. The authors are involved in the SVN development and their earlier CVS book was one of the first I remember being freely available. I think it actually spawned two
For git, I’ve found http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/ to be useful, but I’m just really starting to play more with git myself.
(I’m trying to remember for sure, but I think the first edition of the CVS book might have included some essays about open source that were separated out to another book, but I’m likely misremembering.)
Oh, forgot to say, I’d echo Jonathan Rochkind’s suggestion of skipping svn. SVN can be a bit tricky to set up in some environments, git seems a lot friendly to “getting up and running” although it’s a bit trickier for me as I have certain habits I have to change from svn.
Thanks for the tip on Packt. I was about to do some ebook shopping for programming books.
Yeah, some things in git are still somewhat confusing for me, but I’m not sure if that’s because I was used to svn, or if it would be equally confusing starting from scratch. Really, getting the hang of version control is a bit confusing no matter what, I remember CVS being confusing at first, then I moved onto svn, then git. As each one gets a little bit more complicated (at the same time paradoxically making CERTAIN common tasks _simpler_) it may be that each one would get harder to start with too, not sure.
But one way or another, git (or possibly a different distributed version control system) make certain common tasks SO much easier than svn, that except perhaps as a tutorial thing to get used to svn, I wouldn’t recommend someone starting out who has a choice use svn instead of one of the newer ones (I use git).
I’m not too thrilled by git right now, myself. I managed to corrupt a local git checkout and it took me major cartwheels to recover. The available documentation is beyond dreadful. Sometimes I wonder whether I’m just getting too old to learn new things, though.
I’ll give a plug for O’Reilly’s Safari, though. As you may have heard me complain, renovation to our building forced me to box up most of my books. After using Safari almost daily for over a year, I now suspect that I’d go to it first rather than the print copies. I hated the iphone app when I used it, though.
All due respect to the folks that have already commented … I have used GIT, Subversion, CVS, Mercurial (and other source mode management systems that I would just as soon forget) and I think that subversion is a great way to get started. I wouldn’t recommend setting SVN (or GIT up by yourself), just get one of these free hosted repositories at Assembla or Unfuddle or one of those guys. Then download a copy of Tortoise SVN Client and you are set to play around and learn the system.
I’m going to second Jonathan Rochkind’s comment and recommend that you use Git instead of Subversion, since that’s where a lot of projects are going right now. Now, don’t get me wrong: I like Subversion and even have a copy of Versions, but Git works really, really well. I’m not wild about GitX, which comes with the Mac distribution of Git, but thankfully, I can use TextMate to do my Git commits.
You can also read around 600 O’Reilly titles for free via PaperC, a German startup. It only costs money if you want to print a page or add notes, etc. The O’Reilly titles were in negotiations for a long time and just appeared last week. The interface is currently only in German, but the English interface is only a matter of weeks away.
The founders of PaperC, who are frequent guests here on campus in Leipzig, are very ambitious about building their platform. I marvel that O’Reilly put their titles out there for free reading given the existence of Safari, but perhaps they are just dabbling in new models. At any rate, we readers win.
Well, crud, the compressed link botched the query string somehow. Here is the full link to the O’Reilly content on PaperC.
http://paperc.de/advanced_search?conditionsplain_text=&conditionstitle=&conditionscontributors=&conditionspublisher_display_name=o%27reilly&withyear_of_publicationbegin=&withyear_of_publicationend=&commit=Suchen
Ick, messy syntax.
Sorry about the comment spam. Apparently their URLs are not static. At any rate, shove o’reilly in the box that says Verlag and click the button. Voila.