So, those are the basics of CVS. Since there's no point in rewriting what has already been written, you'll want to head on over to the CVS Website and read their official documentation.
Other source code versioning systems exist, such as Microsoft's Visual Source Safe, Perforce, Subversion and others. Subversion is a newer, more robust free version control system built by the original makers of cvs. CVS has many flaws: such as not being able to delete directories and a lack of atomic commits, that subversion fixes. However, subversion requires more work to setup and is generally overkill for small, personal projects.
Other fancy projects work to give you statistics for your CVS repository: who committed what, how many lines of code they committed, etc. StatCVS is my personal favorite for this ;).
