Customer Reviews

Subversion 1.6 Official Guide - Version Control with Subversion

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As one of the authors attributed to this work, I want to caution you that you might not be getting what you've paid for.

This book takes its content from the open-source document "Version Control With Subversion", which was written almost entirely by myself and the two co-authors attributed to this book (Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick). Our text is freely available at [svnbook dot red-bean dot com], and is licensed such that anyone who wants to do so may take our text and publish it. The folks who've produced this "Subversion 1.6 Official Guide" book have apparently done exactly this, taking the latest version of our text, changing its name from the original "Version Control With Subversion", and releasing it as a different work. This is all well within the legal bounds with respect to our content, so it's not that about which I'm concerned and cautioning you, the reader.

What bothers me is that this book claims to be the official guide for Subversion 1.6 while a) not actually being that, because the aforementioned open-source book is the official guide, and b) almost certainly not containing information related to any version of Subversion newer than 1.5. Why? Because myself and my co-authors haven't gotten around to updating the official book with that information, and neither has anyone else.

Now, in fairness, I've not read this book. What I can see of it via Amazon's "Click to Look Inside" feature confirms that it is, in fact, our source material that was used. It contains our Acknowledgements. It even contains our thinly populated index (we were just beginning to play with that feature of Docbook XML, the markup language in which our book is written). There's one change made that I can see in the "What's New in Subversion" section, a one-line description of Subversion 1.6 that anyone could have easily composed from Subversion 1.6's release announcement or notes.

It is possible, then, that the producers of this book have, in fact, updated the text to cover Subversion 1.6. But if you're going to spend the money to take that gamble, you might first consider reading the actual official text over at [svnbook dot red-bean dot com], which I'm slowly updating to cover Subversion 1.6 myself.