Customer Reviews

Pragmatic Guide to Subversion (Pragmatic Programmers)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I really liked the format of the book. The book was organized in to 48 tasks such as Task #7 "Checking Out a Working Copy". This makes the book a very nice quick reference with good detailed instructions. I also liked how each task references related tasks. The tasks are designed such that with the book open you get a detailed description and instructions on the left page and step by step examples on the right page. The instructions and examples cover the SubVersion Command Line Client, TortoiseSVN Windows Client, and Cornerstone MAC Client.

There was not much I did not like about the book. However, it would have been nice if the book included an example of integrating SubVersion into Visual Studio.

A note for users interested in hosting their SubVersion repository on their own computer without installing server software. Task #4 "Creating a Local Repository" gives good instructions on creating a local repository. Be sure to read the example carefully, because the URL to your repository will look something like (note the triple forward slash) file:///C:/MyRepository/MyProjects/Trunk" assuming you create your repository in a directly called "C:\MyRepository" and create multiple projects within the repository as the book suggests.

Conclusion:
I recommend The Pragmatic Guide to SubVersion to anyone who needs to get started using SubVersion quickly and easily.

This book is very readable, and I like the style. However, it simply doesn't deliver in terms of being able to do the minimum functionality needed to use Subversion. Many of the simplest items, like importing a repository from existing code, were incomplete. (OK, so I have imported, now what? Do I add the files, update, commit?). The book contains many discrete steps, but does not tell you the order in which those steps should be accomplished to do what the reader needs to do (and it is far from obvious).

The book also assumes the rosy path. For example, in the section on handling conflicts, the author assumes you can just merge text files. But what if the file can't be merged using the text editor? There are many such examples where if all works perfectly, the book would be relevant, but things never seem to work perfectly.

I realize that this book is intended to be a concise reference, but the next version should be more tutorial in style, and needs to address real-life problems which arise almost every time I have ever had to use Subversion.

A good digest of Subversion's capabilities. The author's writing style is terse yet conversational, and the book progressed nicely from basic topics to those more advanced. Overall, I think the book is an excellent follow-up to Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion.

This is a sort of funny book. It's not clear what level of user it's really aimed at. Organized into 48 short (2-3 page) chapters each covering specific topics. Some are good, though the better ones certainly require a level of familiarity with version control in general.

A bunch of chapters seem really useless though: "Installing a GUI Client on Macintosh"? That boils down to "download from the internet, and drag and drop into the Applications folder." Other chapters are also focussed on platform-specific practices, like using Tortoise SVN on Windows. These aren't bad, but they seem to needlessly duplicate basic information easily found online at these products' websites.