A Practical Guide to Linux

The book A Practical Guide to Linux combines the strengths of a tutorial and those of a reference. It is a large book covering many aspects of linux. The book has significant coverage of emacs, vi, GCC, GDB, RCS, CVS, as well as many other programs which come with Linux.

CVS and the Book:

The chapter on Programming Tools contains a section which introduces usage for the most common and important CVS commands (pages 567-576). It also contains a one page introduction to tkCVS. Part II of the book includes a reference manual for the most common CVS commands and options (pages 702-708).

Errata and Updates:

The author's web page contains errata from the author.

Page 569 claims that one specifies -H after the name of a CVS command to get help (for example, "cvs log -H"). In fact, doing so will produce an "illegal option" message with CVS 1.9 and later and the correct usage always has been to specify -H before the command name (for example, "cvs -H log").

Page 704 claims that omitting -m from the cvs add command will cause CVS to prompt you for a file description. In fact, in this case CVS will just use an empty description.

Page 705 and page 573 both claim a directory must be listed in the modules file for the cvs release command to process it. This restriction is no longer present in CVS 1.6 and later.