I have heard it is good practice to use some kind of document management system to keep track of different versions of your code/documents for school/work etc. I am still a student so my repository would just be local to my machine. I'm looking for some advice to get started/get in the habit of doing so. Im using OSX. What is the best/easiest client to use for my purposes? I've used SVN+tortise at work for years and it works great.
Thanks!
If you are ready to learn something new, I would recommend you to learn git. Find the right local GUI for you and go ahead with local repositories. You have here a list of good git GUI for OSX.
Later on, but not really needed, it will be easy for you to share your data between all your computers with a project management system like Indefero or the many available.
If you are comfortable with Subversion, I suggest you keep using it. Don't use CVS; I believe it's obsolete. If you are just working by yourself, centralized version control is a better model than distributed version control. I suggest you read more general materials on version control which can usually be found in the first chapter of the guides to different version control systems. These will give you lots of different perspectives. You can read about my own personal debates at my blog.
I would highly recommend that you learn to use Git. You can create a repository anywhere on your computer and start committing, and if you want to share that information later, its as easy as pushing.
The best git client I've seen for osx is Gitti, but it is in private beta.
I used bazaar (bzr) for my dissertation as a student as it seemed like the easiest thing to use locally at the time and I fancied trying something other than SVN. Nowadays I would probably use git.
It's definitely a good idea to use it for coursework and after the first time you have to rescue something with it I doubt that you'll ever go back.
I tend to use the command line clients for version control systems as this gives me the best understanding of the system and a greater feel of control (this may or may not be imagined given the quality of tools like Tortoise these days). If you're at all used to using command line tools such as grep, awk and sed then the command line tools get very powerful.