Book excerpt: This easy-to-follow reference shows a variety of professionals how to use the Concurrent Versions System (CVS), the open source tool that lets you manage versions of anything stored in files. Ideal for software developers tracking different versions of the same code, this new edition has been expanded to explain common usages of CVS for system administrators, project managers, software architects, user-interface (UI) specialists, graphic designers and others. Current for version 1.12, Essential CVS, 2nd Edition offers an overview of CVS, explains the core concepts, and describes the commands that most people use on a day-to-day basis. For those who need to get up to speed rapidly, the book's Quickstart Guide shows you how to build and use a basic CVS repository with the default settings and a minimum of extras. You'll also find: A full command reference that details all aspects of customizing CVS for automation, logging, branching, merging documents, and creating alerts Examples and descriptions of the most commonly used options for each command Why and when to tag or branch your project, tagging before releases, and using branching to create a bugfix version of a project Details on the systems used in CVS to permit multiple developers to work on the same project without loss of data An entire section devoted to document version management and project management includes ways to import and export projects, work with remote repositories, and shows how to fix things that can go wrong when using CVS. You'll find more screenshots in this edition as well as examples of using graphical CVS clients to run CVS commands. Essential CVS also includes a FAQ that answers common queries in the CVS mailing list to get you up and running with this system quickly and painlessly.