Maybe this will be covered in the next article, but 'configure exclusive' and 'configure private', two other configure features, have saved my butt on more than one occasion.

'configure exclusive' is nice if you are in the middle of a maintenance and don't want anyone else to make changes to the config that might conflict or override yours. It locks the configuration so no one can commit until you log out of configure mode.

'configure private' is even neater - say you're working on making some changes, but others also need to make changes. This happens frequently in our NOC where support techs need to make minor interface changes to bring up new circuits and such. I can't really lock them out of the config, so I 'configure private' and my configuration changes get put into a private file that does not get merged into the current configuration until I perform my own commit.