Version Control for a beginner

Question

I'm totally new to the world of programming and understand very little in terms of jargon and typical methodology.

A while ago I was writing some code but accidentally deleted some good code while I was deleting bad code. From then on I started creating versions of my files, I would name each file with the date and a version number.

However, this is a pain in the ass, having to give a unique name to each file and then going to my core file and changing the reference to the name of the new file.

And then, just the other day I accidentally overwrote something important even with this method, probably because of a typo in the name.

Needless to say, this method sucks.

I'm looking for suggestions on better practices, better tools. I've been looking at version control, but a lot of them, git-svn look really complicated. The idea is to speed up the whole versioning process, not make it harder by having to do command line.

Right now I'm hoping that there's a tool that would save a unique version of the file every time I hit ctrl-s, and give me one button to create a finalized version.

Of course,if there are suggestions for totally different ways of doing things, that would be more awesome.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Subversion is more or less the gold standard.

I'd suggest (especially for a newbie) that you check out BeanStalk (www.Beanstalkapp.com) to run your subversion server and TortoiseSVN for your client.

Good luck!