SVN Training Materials

Over the last few years, I've worked with quite a few different file versioning systems, including the most common one: nothing. SourceSafe, PVCS Dimensions, Team Foundation Server, CVS, Subversion, etc. Whenever working on a personal project or if asked for a recommendation, I end up back with Subversion.

However, I've found that lots of other developers have had little to no experience with any versioning system. The basics of checking files in and out and even merging rarely cause problems. A quick session at a new developer's desk and people are up and running.

Merging, branching and tagging, on the other hand, nearly always ends up causing enough confusion that teams I'm on ask if we can do a more elaborate training session. As I've done a few of these before, I usually end up leading them.

Exactly that is happening on my primary project. They've got a bunch of old code in SourceSafe with newer stuff in Subversion. We're migrating everything to SVN (since the SourceSafe repository is crumbling and getting corrupted) and working to leverage SVN's branching and tagging for production and dev branching, etc.

So, I set up a training session to help everyone get up to speed, but wasn't looking forward to putting together my own diagrams to explain this stuff again (as I never seem to hold on to anything I put together from before).

I figured that there had to be some diagrams out there to help explain the conceptual parts and maybe some "scripts" to work through as exercises.

Even better, I found an entire set of SVN training materials under the CC-BY open source license. It includes both the admin and the user end of things and includes lots of Powerpoint slides, complete with nice diagrams. This is certainly going to make preparing for the session much easier.