http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=390813

"What Is Software Configuration Management?

* By Tom J. Milligan and David E. Bellagio
* Jul 15, 2005
* Sample Chapter is provided courtesy of Addison-Wesley Professional"

Makes a better list than most of best practices.

http://www.cmcrossroads.com/content/view/12023/726/ is a review of Perforce. It seems fair. The lack of "install models" to tame the complexity of P4 was not mentioned as a fault. It truly is. Also, they did not mention the fact it is not from Microsoft.

You will need wget on your system! See http://www.asitis.org/installing-wget-for-mac-os-x for the Mac. If you have Windows, well, you will need to do something else.

If you want to get all the Perforce files in one step, try this:
#!/bin/bash
cd perforce
mkdir Win32
cd Win32
wget http://www.perforce.com/downloads/perforce/r08.1/bin.ntx86/p4vinst.exe
wget http://www.perforce.com/downloads/perforce/r08.1/bin.ntx86/perforce.exe
wget http://www.perforce.com/downloads/perforce/r08.1/bin.ntx86/p4webinst.exe
wget http://www.perforce.com/downloads/perforce/r08.1/bin.ntx86/p4dtg.exe
wget http://www.perforce.com/downloads/perforce/r08.1/bin.ntx86/p4winst.exe
wget http://www.perforce.com/downloads/perforce/r07.3/bin.ntx86/p4gt.exe
wget http://www.perforce.com/downloads/perforce/r07.3/bin.ntx86/p4ofc.exe
wget http://www.perforce.com/downloads/perforce/r07.3/bin.ntx86/p4rpt.exe
wget http://www.perforce.com/downloads/perforce/r08.1/bin.ntx86/p4ftpd.exe
cd ..
mkdir MacOSX-Intel

Perforce Knowledge Base: Branching work in progress shows how you branch work in progress.

Comments are mine. The commands are from Perforce with no known edits.
When I see strings hard coded, I want to abstract them into variables.
Maybe,
VCFOLDER=//depot
PROJECT=/project
LABELTAG=home
STREAMIN= < could be main/qa/QA a defined branch point.
STREAMOUT=work-project
LOCALIN=c:\app-src\project
LOCALOUT=c:\app-src\work-project

So this

p4 integ -v //depot/project/...@home //depot/work-project/...
xcopy/s/i $LOCALIN $LOCALOUT c:\app-src\work-project

would be

p4 integ -v $VCFOLDER$PROJECT...@$LABELTAG $VCFOLDER$STREAMOUT...
xcopy/s/i c:\app-src\project c:\app-src\work-project

REM Notice the use of the @home.
REM work-project is a new VCS folder.

p4 integ -v //depot/project/...@home //depot/work-project/...

Cost of Ownership:
How much does cost to use Perforce? That depends on how much time you current use with version control.
If used it 100%, which is impossible it would cost 36 cents/hour the first year and only 8 cents/hour after that.

Where to get it:

http://www.perforce.com/perforce/loadprog.html is the link to download the server and clients. You don't pay anything to start using Perforce. When you start using it with more then 2 people, you will have to get an evaluation license from Perforce.
wget http://perforce.com/perforce/doc.081/manuals/cmdref/cmdref.pdf
Mac Notes: http://kb.perforce.com/HardwareOsNe..rkReference/OperatingSystems/Mac/Pe...