Customer Reviews

CVS Pocket Reference, Second Edition

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book fails to be a pocket reference. The book's index is a joke and as a result your topic of interest is not listed or, and that is a major drawback for reference books, discussed somewhere else. And if you find your topic the information presented is often not sufficient to answer your question. Although I keep this book within arm reach on my desk, I always use the web for my CVS questions. My advice for people with basic CVS knowledge and the ability to use CVS from the command line: search the web and pick one of the many CVS related web sites as your starting point for more information on CVS. This books does not keep up with the O'Reilly standards and is therefor best ignored.

This is a great reference book. Note the title, it is a small, pocket sized concise _reference_ guide. It assumes that you already understand CVS and its functionality, and just need something to grab to look up that obscure command that you rarely use. It is exactly as advertised, and lives up to O'Reilly's good name.

O'Reilly unfortunately doesn't have a full blown book on CVS yet. In the meantime I recommend Open Source Development With CVS by Karl Franz Fogel, also available on Amazon.com.

This pocket reference summarises the basics of CVS. It's enough to get you going, but I wouldn't rely on it for a major project. The explanation of how CVS works is short; the part I've found most useful is the handy table of CVS commands and options in the second half of the book.

However, there is extensive online documentation for CVS that goes into far greater depth than this book, is more up to date, and is free. Even though I've had the book, I've still needed to refer to this online documentation to learn the finer points of tags, branching, and other CVS features.

So it's really a matter of whether you want to pay to have some (but not all) useful information in a handy booklet. If that appeals to you, great, this isn't a bad book. But you can certainly live without it by using your computer as a reference tool.

If you are looking for a great quick reference guide for CVS... this is it. "CVS Pocket Reference" provides a substantial amount of information for those already familiar with the CVS tool.

If this is your first experience with CVS, this is not the book for you. However, if you have used CVS in the past... perfect reference tool.

This does not do CVS justice and is a terrible reference. I give it two stars just for existing, but it doesn't provide anything you can't get from cvs -H. As such, this should be a reference based around what you want to do with CVS, not just the syntax of the commands (which you can easily get from cvs itself). For example, to find out how to make a bugfix branch is impossible. I don't think it's even mentioned. It's way easier to consult the official documentation. There's not even an index or any way to quickly look up anything, and the book is only 75 pages!

If you want a real CVS reference, print out the official docs. It has much better info, serves as a great reference, and has an index as well as table of contents (neither of which are in this book).

It's an OK book if you have some knowledge of CVS already but as most people would use CVS in an networked environment the online documentation is actually better and up to date.

Omits vital information: permissions on CVS repository directory, setting up a CVS admin, setting up users.

This won't help you if you don't already know CVS. If you know CVS you probably don't need this.

I often find myself on teams that have little to no experience with CVS. This pocket reference serves as a quick reminder for them on how to interact with CVS. Until you learn CVS well, make sure to have this by your side.

A couple of years ago I started using CVS for large projects with lots of files. I bought this book back then, but have used it very little. Everything is in the UNIX man pages, and there is online documents.

This book is so inferior to the available on-line documentation you shouldn't waste your money. The book is little more than an incomplete list of the available CVS commands with no helpful explainations.