"Software Configuration Management Strategies and Rational ClearCase: A Practical Introduction" (Addison-Wesley; ISBN 0-201-60478-7) by Brian White is a book on configuration management , formerly known as source control, from the viewpoint of ClearCase. Brian appears to be a Rational employee so the reader needs to keep in mind that this will be biased book going in.

A product aside: as a consultant, I have just about used a different source control system on every project I've worked on. Out of the 10 or so I have serious experience with, I rank ClearCase as the third best. My favorite is JavaSafe, which is a dead product. My next favorite is CVS because it is light weight yet powerful at the same time. ClearCase's best point is that from the end developer it is very easy to use and for the Windows person the most integrated of any of the systems I've seen. The downsides from my point of view is that it is time-consuming to admin (generally a full-time source control manager is needed), can cause performance problems if not configured exactly right, and it is easy to forget which branch you are in and edit the wrong branch. But anyway, the good of the product definitely outweigh its faults.

A footnote for those who are curious as to what my worst source control system is. Well the runners up include PVCS and a custom written set of Perl scripts sitting on top of RCS that were worse than RCS by itself, but it really wasn't close. IBM Visual Age's Team Repository (the single user repository is okay) wins hands down. I hated it for the longest because I'd lose stuff. Then one day I realized how it actually worked and found all the "lost files". I hated it even more after that but it is so insanely convulved under the scenes. I've never seen a software project work the way it thinks they should work and it is not flexible.

Let's get back to the book. The book starts with history of SCM and best practices. The author is extremely well versed in these topics and makes a good case for his conclusions. In a few cases, I disagree with him and that's probably why he is a ClearCase person and I'm a CVS person. However, he reached his conclusions with much thought and are a valid point of view.

He then covers the Unified Change Management Model. I've never heard of this book. I think it is just Rational's model of how things should be done and not really an industry standard (as of yet). It fits ClearCases view of the world, but looks like it could easily be adapted to most source control systems.

The rest of the book is more concerned with the actual workings of ClearCase. Since I currently don't have access to a ClearCase system, I skimmed the remainder of the book.

It is nice to read a product book by someone who understands the bigger issues and yet knows the product well. This book is about implementing a software configuration philosophy in ClearCase. This is a welcome book because too many product books look at the how and not the why. This book gives you the why first. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is using ClearCase.