Much of this chapter was based on the excellent book, Version Control with Subversion by Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick and C. Michael Pilato.

There are important differences between a client-server SCM, such as Subversion or CVS, and a distributed SCM, such as Mercurial or Git. In the client-server model, developers use a shared single repository; in the distributed model, each developer works directly with their own local repository, and changes are shared between repositories as a separate step.

Subversion is a great SCM to learn for those who want to make the jump to distributed SCMs. Here are two excellent guides: