[Edu-sig] Teaching students to use CVS

[Dustin Mitchell]

On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, Timothy Wilson wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm a little more than 1/4 of the way through my Intro. to Comp. Prog. class
> and we're starting to get into slightly more complicated assignments. (Well
> maybe we're not quite there yet.)
> 
> Anyway, I'd like to have a way for my programming teams to collaborate on
> their code. Has anyone tried teaching beginning comp. prog. students to use
> CVS? It would be easy enough to drag out an old server and set it up for
> this purpose.
> 
> Any hints or experiences that anyone would share?

Dave Beazley, author of Python Essential Reference and University of
Chicago Assistant Professor, uses CVS for most of his advanced-level
undergraduate courses.  It's worked out pretty well.  His course material
is available from his website, http://systems.cs.uchicago.edu/~beazley/,
including a quick overview of CVS.  

Basically he gives students the common syntaxes, and sends them to the
manpages for more.  But nearly all of the courses in that department are
"read the manpage or fail" classes.

If you're using Windoze, WinCVS may be an option -- it's not too
complicated to learn, and saves a lot on all that syntax you need for the
UNIX 'cvs' command.

Dustin

-- 

  Dustin Mitchell
  dustin@cs.uchicago.edu
  dustin@ywlcs.org