By Alexandru Serban
404 Pages
http://www.amazon.com/SourceSafe-Software-Configuration-Management-Practice/dp/1904811698/

Publisher’s Description: This book uses a real-world case-study project to teach you how to manage software configuration efficiently using Visual SourceSafe 2005, Microsoft's Software Configuration Management (SCM) solution for independent developers and for developers working in small- and medium-sized teams. It also provides a best-practices reference on using SourceSafe 2005 to manage the software development lifecycle.

My Thoughts: Why aren’t there more books on SourceSafe?  Moreover, why is SourceSafe so anti-intuitive?  I realize it has seamless integration with Visual Studio, but actually setting up projects in it is a painful process, and forking code and merging branches isn’t that easy either. 

This book does explain how to do these things, but it isn’t written very well.  There are a ton of screenshots that let you easily follow the author through some examples, but a lot of them could have been excluded.  With a good editor, this book could be trimmed down to about 100 pages of real meat.  The author goes into too much detail about the 43 different ways to do something, when really they are all extremely similar or he is going to introduce the way you should really do it at the last of the chapter.

One crucial topic the book left out was how to add stored procedures to SourceSafe.  That is one of the most attractive things about it, and it was left out completely.

But, there isn’t a better book out there that I know about … so what can you do?  It is better than the built-in help in SourceSafe, so it was probably worth the money for me and earned a spot on the bookshelf.  But it wouldn’t take much for someone to through together a better book, not to mention better software.