Learning Version Control, and learning it well [closed]

Answer 1

I also, like you, never really felt a 100% comfortable with SVN or SourceSafe.

Check out Mercurial. Quickstart and Cheatsheets
also a great cheat sheet from DongWoo Lee (his site seems down so I scanned it and uploaded onto mine)

With Mercurial everything seemed a lot more smooth and easy not sure why because it's not that different in commands to others.

Answer 2

I think the most important points one has to learn regarding source control systems are the following:

• the value of small, frequent check-ins/commits
• tagging, branching and merging
• rollbacks
• conflict resolution
• exclusive vs. non-exclusive checkout
• continuous integration
• Test-driven development & automated unit tests vis-a-vis source control systems
• forking

If you've got these major concepts covered, that's pretty much most of the things you'll ever need to know for source control :)

Answer 3

I am not sure how much experience you have with version control systems, but for someone who has no prior knowledge about the concept I recommend reading the first few chapters of the Subversion book. Some of the things described there are specific to Subversion, but many of the concepts are "universal" for version control systems and how to work with them.

I think it's very important that people make an effort in trying to understand the main concepts and rationales behind version control systems before starting to use them. All too often I see developers only using a small subset of their system's features because they don't understand the underlying concepts and therefore either don't see the point in using what they consider "advanced" or "unnecessary" features, or they are simply afraid to do so in fear of breaking something or causing problems for the project.

Having experienced this phenomenon with many developers in the past, I recently wrote up a summary of what I consider best practices for version control on my blog.

Answer 4

IMHO, the best network resource for Configuration Management would be The ACME Project by Brad Appleton

You should read about all SCM patterns and Anti patterns. All SCM technical terms are well defined on this site and there are many articles on branching techniques, agile SCM and other important stuff.

This, probably, will give you enough theoretical background to handle any specific version tool.

As to a Subversion book, it is probably will be the Official Subversion book which was mentioned above. It is available online for free or you can purchase a hard copy.

Answer 5

To answer your question re: Which are the most important points to master I would suggest that after you get through the whole checking in and out process, rolling back to old versions and performing diffs you should take a look at branching. Branching can help you deal with the pain of being in the middle of a large change and suddenly needing to perform a bug fix and deploy it to production without the mixing in the half done stuff you are working on.

Answer 6

I found this useful Source Control HOWTO by Eric sink