Practical Subversion and Other Subversive Practices

Since I'm a fan of the book Programming Ruby, I purchased the two Pragmatic Programmer books, Pragmatic Version Control Using CVS and Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion. I was planning to use them as a quick refresher to CVS and a quick cross-introduction to Subversion, since I have a couple of years of experience using (and occasionally fixing) CVS repositories, and also have used a couple of other tools including MKS RCS, Voodoo, and (a little bit of) ClearCase, and we are implementing a Subversion repository at work.

I wound up returning the books to the store, though. I would recommend either of them to someone who is new to both tools, but they are too light for someone who has already used one of these version control systems extensively.

For CVS, there are plenty of free texts available online, including the venerable Cederquist, which is a bit hard to use as a tutorial, and the Fogel and Bar book (at http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/). I have the second edition in the dead tree edition; the third edition is available free online. If you like it, buy a paper copy.

For Subversion, although there are some free texts available, I decided that Practical Subversion, by Garrett Rooney, is the right text, on the right level, at the right time, for me. The chapter on best practices alone helps differentiate it from other books which tend to be organized around a command-line options reference. We'll see how it holds up as I gain a little more experience with Subversion.

I also picked up a copy of The Reasoned Schemer. I am a big fan of The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer, although I must admit I have not completed The Seasoned Schemer.

I also started reading A Little Java, a Few Patterns, which is an effort to teach functional and recursive programming using Java. Given that I had a lot of Java experience and had already thought a lot about design patterns, it seemed like a strange and forced hybrid, so I decided not to bother with it and just work on Scheme instead. The book may be interesting to developers who know Java and who would like to begin to understand Scheme.

I am now re-skimming The Little Schemer as a warmup to a new book on logic programming. I've been interested in learning Prolog for a while now but have not gotten much past reading part of Clocksin and Mellish's book Programming in Prolog, 5th ed. Given that I'm currently learning Scheme, implementing a Prolog-like language in Scheme might be the impetus that I need. If I get enough time to work on it I will report on what I find.