Organization of This Book

The chapters that follow and their contents are listed here:

Chapter 1, Introduction

Covers the history of Subversion as well as its features, architecture, components, and install methods. Also includes a quick-start guide.

Chapter 2, Basic Concepts

Explains the basics of version control and different versioning models, along with Subversion's repository, working copies, and revisions.

Chapter 3, Guided Tour

Walks you through a day in the life of a Subversion user. It demonstrates how to use Subversion to obtain, modify, and commit data.

Chapter 4, Branching and Merging

Discusses branches, merges, and tagging, including best practices for branching and merging, common use cases, how to undo changes, and how to easily swing from one branch to the next.

Chapter 5, Repository Administration

Describes the basics of the Subversion repository, how to create, configure, and maintain a repository, and the tools you can use to do all of this.

Chapter 6, Server Configuration

Explains how to configure your Subversion server and the three ways to access your repository: HTTP, the svn protocol, and local access. It also covers the details of authentication, authorization and anonymous access.

Chapter 7, Advanced Topics

Explores the Subversion client configuration files, file and directory properties, how to ignore files in your working copy, how to include external trees in your working copy, and lastly, how to handle vendor branches.

Chapter 8, Developer Information

Describes the internals of Subversion, the Subversion filesystem, and the working copy administrative areas from a programmer's point of view. Demonstrates how to use the public APIs to write a program that uses Subversion, and most importantly, how to contribute to the development of Subversion.

Chapter 9, Subversion Complete Reference

Explains in great detail every subcommand of svn, svnadmin, and svnlook with plenty of examples for the whole family!

Appendix A, Subversion for CVS Users

Covers the similarities and differences between Subversion and CVS, with numerous suggestions on how to break all the bad habits you picked up from years of using CVS. Included are descriptions of Subversion revision numbers, versioned directories, offline operations, update vs. status, branches, tags, metadata, conflict resolution, and authentication.

Appendix B, WebDAV and Autoversioning

Describes the details of WebDAV and DeltaV, and how you can configure your Subversion repository to be mounted read/write as a DAV share.

Appendix C, Third Party Tools

Discusses tools that support or use Subversion, including alternative client programs, repository browser tools, and so on.