LearnHub

Best and most popular are very subjective terms. I would guess that subversion is the most popular within the RoR community, but cvs is still champs in the unix world from what I see. In .NET shops I wouldn’t be surprised if they use neither, instead choosing Team Server or Visual Source Safe.

My personally, svn is better than cvs because its histories are bundled around the check-in not the individual files.

(Of course, when I’m talking to organizations I advocate Perforce over either)

-adam

Or, you could use python.

import hashlib

i = hashlib.md5()

i.update(open(“zsi-2.0.pdf”, “r”).read()) #change this to be your file

print i.hexdigest()

7350668e41ed1395a8d5ce151e5d0644

Note that this will put the entire file into memory. Don’t try this with multiple gig log files.

Since most scripting languages these days are able to do rapid, cross-platform development I find it more useful to work backwards and eliminate other languages.

Perl - not intuitive to learn - has a legacy of being difficult to maintain - community is split between v5 and v6 (this will likely be an issue for Python as well after 3.0)

Ruby - lack of unicode support in the base (though that is changing soon if not already) - lack of real momentum for anything other than rails.

To further expand on this point; not only is this an extension but I hope to see it serve as base platform for further lessons that cover the material in different languages. Currently it is unix and python centric but it will expand over time to cover other platforms and languages while still serving as an introductory software design and build community.