On Windows, I *can* use putty as an ssh wrapper for subversion (svn+ssh://). This was a welcome surprise, because I was using TortoiseSVN which included its own ssh wrapper. TortoiseSVN is widely accepted among most developers on Windows, but I'm still used to the old CVS command line ('cvs up', 'cvs co', etc) and I always hated wading through Explorer to do an update. Anyway, I happened to notice a Subversion folder in my Application Data folder the other day. I went in there and found a file called config. In that file, I saw the old familiar line commented out:

# ssh = $SVN_SSH ssh

I immediately uncommented the line and changed it to:

ssh = \\putty\\plink.exe

In my CVS days I did know that plink is the program you use to tunnel through ssh. I tried to go in and run svn, but I kept getting a "file not found" error. I then looked more carefully at the config file and noticed there was a commented-out section: [tunnels]. I uncommented this section and it worked! That was easy.

My other great discovery was that SVN does, in fact, support keyword substitution like our old friend CVS. You know, $Id$, $Revision$, etc. I have such a habit of putting '// $Id$' at the top of my source files; its not even funny. So the following command magically makes keywords work for svn:

svn propset svn:keywords "Id Author Rev" build.xml

There are more keywords, of course, and you can see the reference to them in the subversion documentation. Executing the above command works for the file given, but if you want it to work with every file, you'll need to specify the keywords in the [auto-props] section of your subversion config file (See above). After trolling a bit, I did find a nice example of a subversion config file on an Apache site.

I hope you put these "discoveries" to good use.

The layout of the book is extremely easy to follow and reference. The individual concepts are grouped into "Items" and those items are grouped into topics that are the chapters of the book. At the very least, every programmer needs to read the first 18 items. I'll give you a brief example of the power of this book.

Item 7: Obey the general contract when overriding equals

Every Java developer tends to think he/she knows when and how to override the Object.equals method. This item explains the core concepts of the method and when and how to implement it. It's over 10 pages of explanation with code examples. I have used the techniques that Josh explained in almost every class I've written since I read this item. Before I read this book almost all of my equals methods failed to follow the general contract.

I could go on all day, but I know this isn't the place for that, so I really do hope that if you're a Java developer, you will own this book if you don't already. The full table of contents can be seen on the book's site.