Rating: 
Summary: Nicely done - well worth it.
Review: I wish I had bought this book a couple of weeks earlier than I did. I was confronted with the task of periodically merging the main trunk onto a branch, and having little CVS experience, I was really struggling. After hours of trial and error on my home Linux system, I more or less got the idea of how it works. However, this book cleared up a couple of mysteries relating to date formats, and also revealed a very cool way to use the diff command (try the -c option). It reveals some alternative ways for for reverting to previous versions; and the explanation of the CVS archive structure is edifying. All in all a very informative read.CVS's main flaw is it is cryptic and initally not very easy to understand. Once you get the concept down, though, it gets easier. This book very much eases the transition from the initial mystified period to the point where you have a clue. Note: the technical sections are free on the web. I like to have the book, though because it's there for easy reference and I can read it on the train, or at home, etc. I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Rating:
Summary: CVS
Review: I've been bugging Karl with both simple and complex CVS questions for as long as I can remember; I guess I annoyed him enough that he wrote a book just to shut me up! Here at last is a great place to get the answers to all my CVS needs. CVS is complex enough that it deserves a close inspection and detailed examples and explanations. Karl seems to have pulled it all off; this book is well organized and will easily be an essential reference and definitive guide to programmers and managers alike who use revision control in any project, Open Source or not. One of the biggest selling points of this book is that it not only covers CVS but it also examines software development from a design and organization standpoint. It will explain why CVS is such a power tool for seeing a project through, from development to releases (and everything inbetween). It also covers using CVS as a revision control tool for web sites and documents. It is nicely organized, easy to read and follow. You should check this book out for whatever role you play in a company which deals with home-grown source code or documents. If you're a CVS admin, developer or project manager: Get this book.
Rating:
Summary: It was really what I needed
Review: I've been considering source control for a long time, but a few months ago it became really critical. I started studying RCS but it was too low-level for what I needed. Then I found out CVS, but the documentation on the web was more for reference than for practical, quick learning and application. This book was really what i needed: its practical but precise approach taught me many helpful concepts saving me lots of time. It's never boring, it's not either too long neither too short.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: I've been using CVS for a couple of years, read the manual and had great success. However, there have been lots of gaps in my understanding and places where I wasn't really sure what was happenning. This book answered those. It has lots of well chosen examples that illustrate points that I've wondered about, but been afraid to try out for fear of really messing up my CVS repository. The book is a little heavy on the "Open Source" religion, but dismissing it because of that would be a big mistake. This is a fine book.
Rating:
Summary: very useful examples concerning tagging and branching
Review: I've used cvs for a couple of years, but have never really needed tagging or branching until I became a developer on the www.mycibavision.com project. Then, we needed it. Tagging and branching were difficult to grasp for me. This book was critical in helping me to understand what tagging and branching were and how to do use those features.
Aside from that, the main reason I like this book so much is that _everything_ has example code to go with it. Even better is that the output from every command is displayed as well. I found myself executing the commands and then comparing the output. I would highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: very useful examples concerning tagging and branching
Review: I've used cvs for a couple of years, but have never really needed tagging or branching until I became a developer on the www.mycibavision.com project. Then, we needed it. Tagging and branching were difficult to grasp for me. This book was critical in helping me to understand what tagging and branching were and how to do use those features.
Aside from that, the main reason I like this book so much is that _everything_ has example code to go with it. Even better is that the output from every command is displayed as well. I found myself executing the commands and then comparing the output. I would highly recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: excellent, invaluable, not enough about permissions
Review: Open Source Development with CVS Karl Fogel Here is a chatty discussion of CVS and how to use it. The best thing about the book is that he spends a lot of time discussing his examples. That helps you to understand the output. I also found the troubeshooting section to be more than adequate, and a discussion of pcl-cvs (the plugin to emacs) to be a nice and helpful addition. Fogel wrote some chapters about open source development. Call them filler or distractions, still it gives insight about how version control management contributes to open source. . The book has an appendix of descriptions of each command and at times Fogel urges the reader to refer to the Cederqvist manual. I actually appreciated that because it allowed Fogel to write about the things not already found in the online manual. One quibble was with the organization of the book. To learn how to setup CVS from scratch, you need to start by reading chapter 4 (Admin), and then go back and reread chapter 2 (An overview). Maybe a briefer overview would have been better and an explanation of the functions in succeeding chapters. The chattiness of the chapters (which is a good thing) often made it hard to find the user commands. Perhaps user input could have been highlighted in some way. Also, the discussion of file permissions was simply inadequate. Indeed, chapter 4 contained an error related to permissions on page 112 (what does "+R" mean? ) and didn't discuss sticky bits for group ownership. This was significant, because I couldn't proceed with learning CVS until I could figure out those permissions. In short: an excellent, invaluable book, but you should consult the Cederqvist manual for the section of file permissions.
Rating: 
Summary: See also WWW "errata" page
Review: Portions of this book are available online, at http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/ You will also find an errata page there. Enjoy, -Karl Fogel
Rating:
Summary: great book on CVS
Review: Reasons why you should use CVS to manage changes to your source code: 1. CVS manages whole directory trees and permits concurrent updates 2. CVS is very stable and widely used to manage source code (linux kernel, mozilla, gnome, zillions others...) 3. This book is available to understand CVS Availability of a book on CVS does not seem like a big deal; but novices like me are scared of maintaining any change management system, last of all CVS. But after reading this carefully, I am maintaing CVS repositories with aplomb at my programming shop. The additional material about open source development can be skipped, but, why skip the icing on the cake?
Rating: 
Summary: Some good info, but definitely lacking as well...
Review: So, I bought a copy of this thinking, "Finally, a book on CVS!"... Well, it is that, but it's also lacking. It does provide a very usable intro to CVS, but it lacks a lot of the depth that I had hoped for -- for example, there's not much talk about (or if there is and I missed it, then it's not well referenced in the TOC or Index) doing administrative things with the files in the CVSROOT, or those sorts of things. I haven't read the book cover to cover, and maybe I ought to (at least try) before reviewing it, but it got so many 5's that I wanted to make sure I got another opinion out. Another place where I found it to be lacking was in description of style choices. E.g. why it matters whether you use import versus add, or how to lay out directories, or those sorts of things. Anyway, I'm sure I could be a fair bit more clear on my complaints if I'd read more of the book, and more recently, but frankly, from what parts I did read, it's now been sitting on my bookshelf mostly untouched for a while. I do think the book has some merit, and I believe the potential is there for a great second or third edition, but definitely read it with some amount of caution for now, and try to find other references (such as the postscript document that comes with CVS) as well.
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