First=time SVN user -- some questions

[jhsachs]

I'm placing my client's projects under source control, and I'm trying to familiarize myself with SVN. I'm using NetBeans 6.9.1 under Windows XP, with TortoiseSVN available for files that NetBeans doesn't know about. The repository is maintained for us by a hosting service.

At this point I've got two questions.

First, all of the tutorials I've looked at say that after you import a project to SVN you must check it out before using it. However, when I right-click the project and select "Subversion" from the menu, the secondary menu has no "Check out" item. Update, Commit, Merge, and Export are there... but no Check Out. What does this mean? Is the check-out step actually unnecessary in NetBeans, or in general?

Second, what is the best practice for managing packages like jQuery that are used in a project? Should they be incorporated right into the project in SVN (as they currently are in the project on my development machine), or should they be kept separately?