Customer Reviews

Practical Software Configuration Management: The Latenight Developer's Handbook (Bk/Cd-ROM)

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

 

 

I object to the unnecessarily harsh review being given to these authors for their excellent work.

Read the subtitle: "The Latenight Developer's Handbook"

In case you missed it, the authors state it again, on page xvi:

"The book does not discuss theoretical aspects of configuragtion management because we think that inaccessibility has been on of the barriers for broader use of configuration management."

Precisely.

Years of experience? Combined, the authors have over 38 years of practice and MANAGEMENT experience.

And I object to the presumption that it should be used only by small-project teams. This book is listed by the W3C for use by their developers, which is one of the largest collaboration efforts in history.

If you're looking for a textbook with which to teach a class, you may still want to consider whether you want to present "Big Science" configuration management to your students right away. Don't you have an obligation to prepare them with the survival skills they need in industry, before moving on to other topics you personally find more interesting?

These authors deserve better, with their multi-decade experience in bringing software products through the release cycle to the general marketplace, which are even now in day-to-day use by many organizations both large and small.

Put a cover on this book; you're going to wear it out referring to it with your colleagues.

If you are thinking of buying this book, you're probably concerned with some of those the extremely negative reviews it has. I was concerned too, but something made me feel that I shouldn't take those reviews too seriously, so I ordered it. I'm glad I did so.

This is a simple, straight to the point book aimed at the single developer (or small team), without any kind of theoretical discussions, just some basic explanations and simple rules of thumb.

IMHO, the authors of those harsh reviews are SCM managers that were looking for more complex and advanced books.

If you are a developer, you probably consider SCM as tool to make your programming life easier (and not a science or way of life) and you will probably consider this book a good introduction.

If you are looking for some convoluted theoretical mental masturbations on SCM, you should certainly skip it.

This book is targetted to the small development group, either the lone individual developer or the small team. The CD in the back provides RCS, a configuration management software tool. The book is written around using RCS, with specific command lines and examples. If you are already familiar with SCM, do not have an established tool environment, and are working in a small group, I would think this book would be an excellent source. But if you want theory, policy and procedure, or are working in an environment different than the 3 conditions given above, this book is light.

One sidebar comment: This book is not just for software developers. Anyone who is working on a PC to produce products that need to be version controlled would greatly benefit from this book. In particular, professional writers who may be totally unfamiliar with SCM concepts but reconginize the problems they have with versioning would be well served by this book. The authors provide everything a non-systems professional would need to create a modern change control environment on their workstation. Of course, the Unix-like commands may be too much for such a user.

As a developer who has had some configuration management experience I was very disappointed in this book. The basics of CM are covered tutorial style, using RCS as the example tool.

The book repeats much information by breaking it up into individual and team sections. It seems the authors were determined to meet a predetermined number of pages, one appendix is simply a printing of the RCS man pages, which were also included on the CDrom. The reviews of tools are in a nice format but are certainly not thorough enough to really help someone looking for information. The authors would have served thier readership better by covering the material once and then filling pages by adding depth. The authors background should have provided enough experience to produce a better book. "Applying Rcs and Sccs : From Source Control to Project Control" by Don Bolinger, Tan Bronson, Mike Loukides (Editor) is a far better value.

As a person who has over 15 years of experience in SCM and teaches the discipline professionally I found this text completely unacceptable. It doesn't address any of the fundamentals of SCM (i.e., configuration identification, change control, etc.) or and of the primary problems associated with software develpment such as shared data, simultaneous update, etc. Finally, it doesn't address process management, impact analysis, facilitating good communications, running a CCB, and more. About the only thing I found the book is good for is learning about the tool shipped with the book.

Picked up a copy of this not long ago and it is truly a developer's guidance for code management, as told by the authors. It is not a book on configuration management whatsoever, as some of the other reviews have indicated. It does not cover any of the CM discipline doctrine at all. The fact that the authors have chosen a very rudimentary tool such as CVS should indicate clearly that this is not for the more mature development shops whatsoever. This tool hasn't an integrated change management, release management, baseline management, etc. built into it as it is strictly a version management tool. So in a sense the title of the book is very misleading. If you want to see how to try to improve the management of your code base because your development area is rather out of control this might be a good place to start. If your looking for more informative books on the SCM/CM doctrine then this is not the book to purchase. This isn't the book if your on the SW-CMM/CMMI, ISO9001, ITIL, or any other model journey either.