Version control is the process of managing revisions to a collection of electronic artifacts. Most teams of software developers use a version control system to manage project source code.
Concurrent Version Control System (CVS) was the first widely used free open source version control system. However, users of CVS are gradually moving over to another free, open source version control system called Subversion (SVN). Subversion fixes several deficiencies present in CVS while retaining the basic usage patterns of CVS. There is an excellent online book on Subversion: Version Control with Subversion by Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick, C. Michael Pilato.
I use Subversion in the courses I teach and projects I manage. These pages provide some notes useful to students in my classes. These pages may also be used by system administrators to configure Subversion servers.
If you are using Eclipse, you can install the Subclipse plugin, which adds support for Subversion while working inside Eclipse. See Subclipse Installation Instructions to see how to install the Subclipse plug-in using the Eclipse software update mechanism. My experience is that inside the Eclipse update manager you only need to install Subclipse and the JavaHL Adapter to get Subversion client support inside Eclispse. See the Eclipse documentation for further instructions if you have troubling installing the Subclipse plug-in.
There is a subversion plugin for Visual Studio, but it is not free. There are also subversion plugins for other IDEs. However, you don't need to have a Subversion client integrated into your IDE in order to use Subversion; you can always use a stand-alone Subversion client. Command line Subversion clients are easy to install for the varios distributions of Linux. I believe that Mac users are able to easily install a command line Subversion client.
When working on Windows and not inside Eclipse, I use TortoiseSVN, which is a Subversion client that integrates with Windows Explorer. You can downlown TortoiseSVN from the web in the form of an msi file.
If when trying to install the msi file you get a message indicating that you do not have sufficient privileges, then you should try to run the msi file as administrator. One way to do this is to run the Windows command prompt as administrator and then issue the following command, where [msi-file] is the msi file that you downloaded.
msiexec /i [msi-file]
To run Windows command prompt as administrator, right click on the program in the start menu and select Run as administrator.