Good link or book for basics and theory of version control

Question

Good link or book for basics and theory of version control

Would like to really understand all of the fundamentals and theory of version control. Probably implementation agnostic but if book or resource uses something to practice with that is fine.

Was looking at the pragmatic series. Is there something better or open source?

Answer 1

For the basics you should look at the Subversion book.

More advanced is this this article about High-level Best Practices in SCM.

Answer 2

Software Configurations Patterns: Gives a good overview of basic SCM theory and application, with an "agile" slant.

Real World Software Configuration Management: Another good book that covers theory and some of the more popular version control tools.

The Pragmatic Bookshelf has books on SVN, CVS and GIT (scroll down to the Tools section).

Perforce has a page of High-level Best Practices in SCM.

CM Crossroads is a good site for drilling down into SCM details.

Answer 3

A nice Google Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on GIT.

Of course Linus states that GIT is the best you can get and everything else is pretty much rubbish. But this talk is informative, especially if you want to get the developer's point of view.

Answer 4

I found this series by Eric Sink to be helpful.

http://www.ericsink.com/scm/source_control.html

Answer 5

Two links from BetterExplained:

• A Visual Guide to Version Control
• Intro to Distributed Version Control (Illustrated)

There is also Eric S. Raymond, author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "The Art Of Unix Programming" DRAFT of "Understanding Version Control"; note that information about current trends in version control and current version control systems is at the time being (17 July 2009) around 1.5 years out of date.

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Added 18-07-2009:

Each of leading version control systems has user's guide kind documentation which explains basic version control concepts: Version Control with Subversion (aka "svnbook") for Subversion, Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (aka "hgbook") for Mercurial, Git User's Manual or The Git Community Book for Git. I suppose that similar document exists for Bazaar.

I would recommend also reading The Git Parable by Tom Preston-Werner (one of GitHub founders), which describes how distributed version control system such as Git could have been created from first principles (it is fairly close to actual history of Git development, but misses in few points). It helps to understand the generic concepts behind distributed version control system, and the concepts behind design of Git.

Answer 6

• Peepcode videos are a fun way to learn either mercurial or git.

  http://peepcode.com/products/meet-mercurial

  http://peepcode.com/products/git

• This is my favourite introductory article to DVCS.

  http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cduan/technical/git/