Learning version control for a college freshman

Question

I'm a college CS freshman who wishes to learn a version control system well. Currently I'm looking at Subversion, Perforce, and Surround SCM.

I would be integrating the system with Eclipse, on a Linux platform. The code involved would mainly be C++, Java, and LaTeX (which I'll be using Eclipse as well).

Most probably I'll be the only user, but the advantage of SVN is that it is open source, while the other two are proprietary. I've heard a lot of good testimonial on TortiseSVN, but since I'm using Linux, I'll be missing out on that.

EDIT: Thanks for all the answers. Of course, I am open to any other version control systems as well. I will be checking out Git and Mercurial.

Answer 1

If you're learning version control systems, you would definitely do well to consider one of the newer "distributed" version control systems such as Git or Mercurial. By limiting your scope to the previous generation of tools as you mentioned, you will be missing out on what (some) people are really using today.

For learning a system, I probably wouldn't recommend choosing a commercial offering. You will get far better support and documentation, for free, with an open source solution.