One could start by understanding CVS first, I guess. One of the most important sections of "The Cederqvist Document" is "What CVS is Not", in which he discusses how CVS is not a substitute for management, nor is it a substitute for developer communication.
This reality carries forward to SVN, certainly. I see no reason not to keep this same perspective in the Git/GitHub world, or to the Mercurial/Bitbucket world.
http://ftp.gnu.org/non-gnu/cvs/source/stable/1.11.21/cederqv...
This reality carries forward to SVN, certainly. I see no reason not to keep this same perspective in the Git/GitHub world, or to the Mercurial/Bitbucket world.