Mischa Kroon

I just read:  Version Control by Example

It's a free printed book which can be shipped to your home for free by filling out a page full of questions. 
If you want the details on how to get it shipped to your home or have any questions about it find out the details here.

Quick review of the book:

Introduction

The book gives you a quick intro about version control systems, it tells you about the history of version control systems and how they got here. 

What the different commands are for the version control systems and how they work in the specific version control systems examined in the book. 

It then goes into how you can use the different version control systems through the command line interface, so that you can see the differences on how to handle increasingly complex situations. 
The version control systems it gives the examples for are:

- Subversion
- Mercurial
- Git 
- Veracity (SourceGears product) 

There is also a bit about the differences between DVCS and CVCS, distributed version control systems and centralized version control systems. 

My Opinions 

I really like the way the book looks, it's pretty so it leaves a good first impression. 

In talking about the differences between DVCS and CVCS I think it goes a long way to take away a bit of the fear surrounding DVCS.

By focusing on the command line clients of the different VCS systems you're looking at the basics which are great because it gives you the feeling of actually knowing what you're doing. 
The reality for a developer like me working with VCS is someone not working with command line clients but mostly using IDE  / Explorer integration to get the job done.  
So the quality of integration and the tooling available around the VCS'es becomes very important to the way I use VCS, still not talking about this makes perfect sense to me because the tooling landscape is very adaptive and will change over time and the VCS which is on top now can easily be on the bottom when the next generation comes.

The book has quite a bit of depth where it is needed, but it also manages to keeps it short and simple in the examples.

There is a bit of humor in the book, I like it and it keeps the book from getting a bit dry.

Conclusion

The book does its job in educating about VCS and also providing a reference.

Nowhere in the book does it come over as a too much of a sales pitch for the product that the writer has created which is a very impressive thing because of the bias one has when talking about the product that he has created.

So go get it, it's free :)

Disclaimer

I'm not associated with SourceGear in any way.