This book is written for computer-literate folk who want to use Subversion to manage their data. While Subversion runs on a number of different operating systems, its primary user interface is command-line-based. That command-line tool (svn), and some additional auxiliary programs, are the focus of this book.

For consistency, the examples in this book assume that the reader is using a Unix-like operating system and is relatively comfortable with Unix and command-line interfaces. That said, the svn program also runs on non-Unix platforms such as Microsoft Windows. With a few minor exceptions, such as the use of backward slashes (\) instead of forward slashes (/) for path separators, the input to and output from this tool when run on Windows are identical to that of its Unix counterpart.

大多数读者可能是那些需要跟踪代码变化的程序员或者系统管理员。这是 Subversion 最普遍的用途，因此这个场景贯穿于整本书的例子中。但是 Subversion 可以用来管理任何类型的数据 — 图像, 音乐, 数据库, 文档等等。对于 Subversion，数据就是数据而已。

While this book is written with the assumption that the reader has never used a version control system, we've also tried to make it easy for users of CVS (and other systems) to make a painless leap into Subversion. Special sidebars may mention other version control systems from time to time, and 附录 B, CVS 用户的 Subversion 指南 summarizes many of the differences between CVS and Subversion.

需要说明的是，所有源代码示例仅仅是例子而已。这些例子需要通过正确编译器参数进行编译，在这里列举它们只是为了说明特定的场景，并非为了展示优秀的编码风格或实践。