Merge pull request #869 from rpjday/about

Minor tweaks (wording, punctuation) to "About Version Control"

Author: ben

book/01-introduction/sections/about-version-control.asc

@@ -1,12 +1,12 @@
 === About Version Control
 
 (((version control)))
-What is "version control", and why should you care?
+What is ``version control'', and why should you care?
 Version control is a system that records changes to a file or set of files over time so that you can recall specific versions later.
-For the examples in this book you will use software source code as the files being version controlled, though in reality you can do this with nearly any type of file on a computer.
+For the examples in this book, you will use software source code as the files being version controlled, though in reality you can do this with nearly any type of file on a computer.
 
 If you are a graphic or web designer and want to keep every version of an image or layout (which you would most certainly want to), a Version Control System (VCS) is a very wise thing to use.
-It allows you to revert files back to a previous state, revert the entire project back to a previous state, compare changes over time, see who last modified something that might be causing a problem, who introduced an issue and when, and more.
+It allows you to revert selected files back to a previous state, revert the entire project back to a previous state, compare changes over time, see who last modified something that might be causing a problem, who introduced an issue and when, and more.
 Using a VCS also generally means that if you screw things up or lose files, you can easily recover.
 In addition, you get all this for very little overhead.
 
@@ -38,20 +38,20 @@ image::images/centralized.png[Centralized version control diagram]
 
 This setup offers many advantages, especially over local VCSs.
 For example, everyone knows to a certain degree what everyone else on the project is doing.
-Administrators have fine-grained control over who can do what; and it's far easier to administer a CVCS than it is to deal with local databases on every client.
+Administrators have fine-grained control over who can do what, and it's far easier to administer a CVCS than it is to deal with local databases on every client.
 
 However, this setup also has some serious downsides.
 The most obvious is the single point of failure that the centralized server represents.
 If that server goes down for an hour, then during that hour nobody can collaborate at all or save versioned changes to anything they're working on.
-If the hard disk the central database is on becomes corrupted, and proper backups haven't been kept, you lose absolutely everything – the entire history of the project except whatever single snapshots people happen to have on their local machines.
-Local VCS systems suffer from this same problem – whenever you have the entire history of the project in a single place, you risk losing everything.
+If the hard disk the central database is on becomes corrupted, and proper backups haven't been kept, you lose absolutely everything -- the entire history of the project except whatever single snapshots people happen to have on their local machines.
+Local VCS systems suffer from this same problem -- whenever you have the entire history of the project in a single place, you risk losing everything.
 
 ==== Distributed Version Control Systems
 
 (((version control,distributed)))
 This is where Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCSs) step in.
-In a DVCS (such as Git, Mercurial, Bazaar or Darcs), clients don't just check out the latest snapshot of the files: they fully mirror the repository.
-Thus if any server dies, and these systems were collaborating via it, any of the client repositories can be copied back up to the server to restore it.
+In a DVCS (such as Git, Mercurial, Bazaar or Darcs), clients don't just check out the latest snapshot of the files; rather, they fully mirror the repository, including its full history.
+Thus, if any server dies, and these systems were collaborating via that server, any of the client repositories can be copied back up to the server to restore it.
 Every clone is really a full backup of all the data.
 
 .Distributed version control.