Subversion for beginners

Question

Hi! I'm doing a web project when I discovered that I need to save my other versions of a file I'm editing so I can easily revert back if something odd happens. I did a little research and found Subversion. But I really don't get the idea of Subversion. Please help me! I'm thinking twice if I can really use it for my project or not. I want to learn new things like Subversion so I can improve my software engineering skills. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If you are choosing a VCS system from scratch, I would recommend checking out GIT. You can set up a free repository at github.com and they have lots of good documentation as it is somewhat of a steep learning curve.

Git is very impressive on resumes.

Git and Mercurial (Distributed VCS) are very neat systems and they are definately the wave of the future in my opinion.

Here is the open source book for GIT:

http://progit.org/book/

Answer 2

There' the free subversion book if you have your heart set on svn:
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/

You may also want to consider something like Mercurial or Git which are becoming more popular.
There is a great intro to Mercurial and distributed version control in general here:

http://hginit.com/

Answer 3

Perhaps you should read "Version Control with Subversion", which covers nearly everything you'll need to know about subversion. http://svnbook.red-bean.com/

It is published by O'Reilly, but is available for free online.

Answer 4

I think this is pretty straight-forward:

If you need to archive old versions of files and directories, possibly resurrect them, or examine logs of how they've changed over time, then Subversion is exactly the right tool for you. If you need to collaborate with people on documents (usually over a network) and keep track of who made which changes, then Subversion is also appropriate. This is why Subversion is so often used in software development environments— working on a development team is an inherently social activity, and Subversion makes it easy to collaborate with other programmers. Of course, there's a cost to using Subversion as well: administrative overhead. You'll need to manage a data repository to store the information and all its history, and be diligent about backing it up. When working with the data on a daily basis, you won't be able to copy, move, rename, or delete files the way you usually do. Instead, you'll have to do all of those things through Subversion.

From the Subversion Book

Answer 5

I found some easy presentations and exercises under http://subtrain.tigris.org

They cover basic wokingcycle and server installation. There is lesser texts than the subversion book.

So it should be easy to get the basics.

Answer 6

Mercurial is a distributed (no central server needed) version control system similar to Git, and in some ways it may be easier to use than Git. Joel Spolsky has written a beginner's guide to Mercurial at hginit.com.