Rating: 
Summary: Great book, but note the title!
Review: This is a great reference book. Note the title, it is a small, pocket sized concise _reference_ guide. It assumes that you already understand CVS and its functionality, and just need something to grab to look up that obscure command that you rarely use. It is exactly as advertised, and lives up to O'Reilly's good name.O'Reilly unfortunately doesn't have a full blown book on CVS yet. In the meantime I recommend Open Source Development With CVS by Karl Franz Fogel, also available on Amazon.com.
Rating: 
Summary: Full of info, but lousy as a reference
Review: This is the first O'Reilly book I have ever bought that has thoroughly frustrated and disappointed me. It has all the information you need to administer and use CVS correctly, but the problem is finding that information. Amazingly, O'Reilly negelected to include an index, and the table of contents of this 75 page book has just five entries. To make things worse, cross-references include only section names or table numbers, not page numbers. For instance, on p. 18, you read "The legal values for -k are described in Table 19." It will probably take you a while to find Table 19, because it's 30 pages away on p. 48. Similarly, on p. 39, you read this cryptic cross-reference: "See also the 'Repository Structure' section." I still haven't found it. Save your money and read the man pages.
Rating: 
Summary: Useful; worth the price if you don't like man pages
Review: This pocket reference summarises the basics of CVS. It's enough to get you going, but I wouldn't rely on it for a major project. The explanation of how CVS works is short; the part I've found most useful is the handy table of CVS commands and options in the second half of the book. However, there is extensive online documentation for CVS that goes into far greater depth than this book, is more up to date, and is free. Even though I've had the book, I've still needed to refer to this online documentation to learn the finer points of tags, branching, and other CVS features. So it's really a matter of whether you want to pay to have some (but not all) useful information in a handy booklet. If that appeals to you, great, this isn't a bad book. But you can certainly live without it by using your computer as a reference tool.
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