Programmer Musings

Review of Practical Subversion

Practical Subversion
Garrett Rooney
Apress, 2005

I have worked with several version control systems over the years. But my system of choice for the last decade has been CVS. For the last year, I've been looking at Subversion and I like a lot of what I've seen. I've read the book Version Control with Subversion, which does a good job of covering the program, but the information wasn't quite complete. This book answers most of my outstanding questions.

The writing style is quite readable and the examples and explanations are well done and helpful.

However, the book does suffer from a kind of split personality. On the one hand, it wants to be a good handbook; something that you can use to get up and running with Subversion quickly. On the other hand, it wants to be a reference book; where you can go for all the details of setting up and using Subversion under any circumstances. It is possible to do both in one book. If a book covers the basics up front and saves the reference for later, the reader can tell immediately which section he needs..

Unfortunately, Rooney did not take that approach.

The first two chapters are great handbook material. They help familiarize a novice user of Subversion with the tool. These chapters introduce concepts and commands in a very practical fashion. The trouble begins in chapter 3, where the author suddenly changes from the handbook style into a definitive reference of the administration details of Subversion. This reference-style continues for three chapters, before suddenly changing back to practical information with the Best Practices chapter. Then, in the middle of the next chapter, we go back to reference style.

While both the handbook and the reference are necessary, I think it would have been easier on the reader if the two styles had been separated into two separate sections of the book. Changing back and forth makes the book harder to read than necessary.

That being said, I still think this is a very good book that complements the earlier work on Subversion quite well. The reference material on the different server types, programming to the API, and the conversion programs were definitely lacking from the earlier book. Practical Subversion does a great job of filling that lack.

The real highlight of the book for me was the chapter on best practices. Over the years, I had to discover most of these the hard way. It is great to see them written in such a clear and usable fashion. Time and time again, I have seen programmers misuse version control systems because they lacked the wisdom displayed in this one chapter. This chapter should be required reading for every programmer.

Despite the criticisms above, I still found this to be a very good book. I recommend it to anyone who is using Subversion or who plans to use Subversion in the future.