Customer Reviews

Applying RCS and SCCS: From Source Control to Project Control (Nutshell Handbook)

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A good general coverage of RCS and SCCS. However, more than half the book is devoted to a project control system called TCCS. Nowhere in the book does it indicate that TCCS is only an alpha version right now and that several of the features described in the book are not available yet!

This book is far too outdated to be worth of bying. The
version control software RCS is very simple to use,
because you only have to

1) create directory RCS/
2) put file into version control with "ci -u -m message file"
3) get file from version control with "co file"

The Gnu RCS is at version 5.7 and hasn't changes nearly
a decade, so that Manual pages that come with RCS are
very sufficient to learn the version control features.

The books writing is clear and the illustrated pictures
are all as they should be to someone new to version
control. The first 172 pages are what you need, but the
rest of the book, 330 pages (up till page 500) contain
documentation on nearly non-extinct software of SCCS
(Mostly found from basic Sun installations) and
software TCSS, which has never really been used
anywhere. The book devotes lot of pages to TCSS:
information that will never going to use, since there
is no TCCS in today's verison control world.

I suggest that you you print the RCS manual pages (they
are short) and spend your money on bying a CVS book
instead. CVS is more powerful and widely used free
version control client/server software.

The first half of this book is great for someone who has NEVER worked with any Version Control System (VCS) before or someone who is brand new to Source Code Management (SCM). It gives you the generic description of each segment of SCM, and then follows that with an explanation of how that segment is implemented in RCS and SCCS. Well, if you have EVER worked with any VCS before, you could simply read the man pages or check the web for all the information you'd need to get started with RCS. (I haven't used SCCS, so I won't comment on that portion of the book.)

The second half of the book explains TCCS, the authors' solution to extending RCS to Project Management. They suggest many approaches that I personally consider absurd. I've worked with many VCS tools and am currently in the process of implementing a Project Management system for a large IS corporation (500+ developers)...and plan on using few (if any) of the authors' suggestions for applying RCS.

In a nutshell, save your money, check the web, and good luck...

This book does a good job of discussing what Source Control is, and a decent job of describing how to use the RCS command set. But the chapters on SCCS can be skipped if you already have the GNU Tools. As a matter of fact, Programming with GNU Software does a better job of consicely discussing RCS. The rest of the book does a good job of discussing the intricacies of Souce Control as your environment becomes more complex, but the solution details presented for Project Control were incomplete since much of what is proposed is not ready for prime time.

This book provided a good introduction to source control management but was week on implementation of an interface system. TCCS was explained in detail but I was personally looking for the knowledge from TCCS to implement my own interface to RCS via scripting, which was not explained. I too skipped all of the chapters on SCCS and most of the chapters on TCCS and found only 10 of the 23 chapters useful.