Essential CVS (Paperback)

by Jennifer Vesperman (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Essential CVS does what you might think would be a small job more effectively and more comprehensively than I would have imagined, even allowing for the generally high standard of O'Reilly books. Apart from covering the boring stuff well, it has two big advantages over the Web: it backs up its discussion of various CVS functions with wise advice and policies on why and how to use these facilities - plus it provides readable (and, presumably, tested) examples. Computing sciences prizes abstraction and generalities; computing practice should, like this book, be informed by concrete specifics and sensible rules-of-thumb." - Damian Counsell, news@UK, December 2003

Product Description
Essential CVS is a complete and easy-to-follow reference that helps programmers and system administrators apply order to the task of managing large quantities of documents. The book covers basic concepts and usage of CVS, and features a comprehensive reference for CVS commands--including a handy Command Reference Card for quick, on-the-job checks. The book also includes advanced information on all aspects of CVS that involve automation, logging, branching and merging, and "watches." Readers will find in-depth coverage of the following:

• Installing CVS and building your first repository
• Basic use of CVS, including importing projects, checking out projects, committing changes, and updating projects
• Tagging, branching and merging
• Working with multiple users
• Clients, operating systems, and IDEs
• Repository management and managing remote repositories
• Project administration, including bug tracking systems, enforcing log messages, history and annotation, and more.
• Troubleshooting

Version control is essential to maintaining order in any project, large or small. Any CVS user, from beginners to team leaders and system administrators, will find this practical guide to CVS indispensable in getting the most from this valuable tool.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 1st edition (June 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596004591
• ISBN-13: 978-0596004590
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #612,605 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great start to CVS, March 26, 2004

By	Matthew Hunter "Technology Geek" (Blacksburg, VA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I administer our CVS server at work. We use CVS in the traditional way, to manage source code from a group of people working together on multiple projects. Before this book, I didn't have a single reference that explained all the basic functionality of CVS. Now, when someone has a question, I can pass along this book for a quick answer.

Most of the things you'll do with CVS are covered in sufficient detail in this book. I do agree with the reviewer who mentioned this is not the perfect reference for some tasks - like merging branches. This book will, however, give you all the background information you'll need so that you can effectively research complex topics like this on the web. The title is appropriate - 'essential CVS.' It's not 'everything there is to know about CVS' - and that's a strength of the book. It makes it small enough that the average developer can read the 'quickstart,' and have a basic understanding of how things work. They can then use the more detailed chapters to gain further information. Only the CVS administrator will need a little more. Even for them, this book will be a handy reference.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An effective coverage of CVS, December 7, 2003

By	Foti Massimo (Vezia (Switzerland)) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Being part of the "Essential" series, this book doesn't pretend to be the ultimate reference on the subject, but it delivers an effective coverage of CVS. The author start from scratch and goes up to explain more advanced features like tagging and branching. In my opinion the way chapters are organized is not ideal and there is some redundancy here and there, notwithstanding these shortcomings, I would recommend it. Just be advised the whole book is totally Unix centric and all the samples cover only command-line usage.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book if you're a CVS user..., January 7, 2004

By	Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

If you're looking for a low-cost entry into the world of version control software, the open source CVS package is a very logical choice. But like most open source packages, the documentation is less than perfect if you want something more than just a reference manual for learning purposes. It's at this point you need a book that explains a bit more about the why's of what you need to do. This book fills that gap nicely.

The target audience is both users and administrators of the system. Vesperman starts out with an explanation of what version management and source control systems are, and then goes into the usage of CVS for those different groups. And if you are thinking that CVS is just for managing code, think again. CVS can be used to manage any document types, such as code, documentation, images, etc.

If you're using Websphere Application Development Studio (WSAD), the CVS package has an interface built right in. You select that option during WSAD installation, and the right perspectives are added to your environment. You will still need to have a CVS server set up somewhere to manage the source files, and this book will be very helpful in aiding you during that process.

Since CVS is based on the Unix platform, all the examples in the book are set up to use command line interfaces to the functions. Vesperman uses plenty of scripts to show you how to accomplish all the functions, which is great. In my case, I'll be using WSAD to work with CVS as a developer, so many of those examples were wasted on me. Still, the concepts behind CVS and the general capabilities of the package are covered well, so a read-through on this book will benefit you either way.

For Notes/Domino developers, there is no interface you can use for this package. You could, if you wanted, check in your .NSF files and use CVS to manage the version control. You'd lose some of the benefits of CVS like file comparison, but it's still better than having no version control at all. There are non-CVS systems out there for Notes/Domino content management, and you would probably derive more benefit from those packages than trying to use CVS in this case.

Conclusion
If you are moving into the WSAD world for Java development, check out CVS for version management. If you do decide to go with CVS, get a copy of this book to supplement the official documentation. Recommended.