Programmer Musings

Review of Practical Subversion, second edition

Practical Subversion, second edition
Daniel Berlin and Garrett Rooney
Apress, 2006

Two years ago, I reviewed the first edition of Practical Subversion. The second edition has substantially updated the reference information about the Subversion commands. The previous edition had been based on a pre-1.0 version of the program and had somewhat incomplete coverage of the program options. So the update was sorely needed. The production quality of the new edition is also much better. Better font choice and improvements in editing make this edition seem much more professional than the previous edition.

Unfortunately, this edition keeps the structure of the first edition, which I found awkward. The book tries to be both a definitive reference and a practical guide to the usage of Subversion. These very different goals would have been better served by providing the reference information in one section and the guide in another. However, the authors chose to intermingle the two streams of material. Like the first edition, this tends to break the flow of the text. If you are just interested in the practical advice, you are suddenly interrupted with a reference section detailing all of the options for a given subcommand. If you are looking for the options for a single command, you may need to skip over some advice sections to reach the detail that you need.

The bad news is that this structure prevents the book from being either a great reference or a great practical guide. With Version Control with Subversion freely available, there is not as much need for a definitive reference.

I would almost like to see all of the reference material removed or put in an appendix. If you want that information, the definitive on-line reference would be better anyway. More material exploring best practices and giving example usage of some of the commands would have been much more useful to me.

On the other hand, the book still provides a substantial amount of benefit. The sections on the programming API and using the SVN libraries from other languages are once again appreciated. The appendix comparing Subversion to other version control software is also very handy.

All in all, I think I would still recommend this book. The practical advice is effective if not quite as extensive as I would like. The Best Practices chapter is still one of the highlights of the book.