2011-06-07 21:20:00

Hey -- you wanna review my new book?

Updated 14 June:

1. I've got enough reviewers now.  Thanks!
2. Due to popular demand and some assistance from the reviewers, the book will have more Git coverage than I had expected.

Short summary:

I've been writing a book about version control.  The first draft is complete, and I need reviewers to help me polish it and make it shiny.  If you'd like to review the book and provide feedback, contact me at eric@sourcegear.com.

More details:

Back around 2004 I wrote a series of blog entries called Source Control HOWTO.  My original intent was to turn this content into a book.

But I kept getting distracted by something else.  As time passed, the material in the book became rather stale.  Those blog entries were written before DVCS became popular.  Everything in the version control world is different now.  Eventually I realized that if I wanted to write a book about version control, I would be starting from scratch.

A few months ago I dropped everything else to focus on writing.  This week I finished my first draft of the content.  Now I am looking for people who would like to review that draft and give me feedback which I can use to finish polishing it for publication.

Here are some things you need to know:

• The title of the book is "Version Control by Example".  It has 12 chapters and is 216 pages long.
• The emphasis of the book is on DVCS.  Subversion gets lots of attention, but it is the only non-DVCS which is covered beyond a passing mention.  Mercurial is also covered in depth, as is Veracity.  I wish I could have spent a similar number of pages on Git or Bazaar or Fossil or Darcs, but my deadline forced me to make choices.
• This book is not flame war material.  Long-time readers of my blog know that my style is to never hesitate in complimenting my competitors when admiration is warranted.  I have much respect for Subversion and Mercurial, so I chose to spend a lot of time discussing them in the book.  Bickering about whether Mercurial is better than Git is simply not interesting to me, so the book doesn't spend any time on that kind of stuff.
• If you like SourceGear Vault, you probably won't like this book.  My apologies.  This particular book is focused on tools which are open source and command-line oriented.  (Watch for our Vault 6.0 release coming out this fall!)
• The book will be available in printed form.  I am self publishing it, mostly so that the copies I give away will cost me two dollars apiece instead of ten.
• All of the content for this book will be published here on my blog, including HTML, print-friendly PDF, and screen-friendly PDF.
• The book will be sent off to the printers in about three weeks or so.  I'll have copies with me at OSCON.

So now I am gathering a list of people interested in being reviewers.  If you would like to be on that list, send me an email at eric@sourcegear.com.  I will be sending all the reviewers a draft (as a PDF file, roughly 5 MB in size) sometime in the next week.