How This Book is Organized

The first three chapters of this book form a general introduction to Subversion. We begin with a discussion of Subversion's features, discuss its design and user model, and then lead into a guided tour. All readers, regardless of experience, should read these chapters. They form the backbone of the rest of the book.

Chapters four, five, and six discuss the more complex topics of branching, repository administration, and advanced features such as properties, externals, and access control. Sysadmins and power-users will definitely want to read these chapters.

Chapter seven is specially written for programmers who want to use Subversion's APIs in their own software, or want to work on Subversion itself.

The book ends with reference material: chapter eight is a reference guide for all Subversion commands, and the appendices cover a number of useful topics. These are the chapters you're mostly likely to come back to after you've finished the book.