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Summary: Best book on AD I have read so far
Review: I am only part way through this book and loving it. I can't seem to put it down. The author explains in clear detail important topics that you need to know to manage AD. Instead of boring you with highly detailed internals which you would never use anyway, you get simplistic view and explanation of all the things you need to know to be an AD admin. I find myself looking ahead because I can't wait to see whats covered next. As I said, I am only part way through the book but after 200+ pages, I don't think my opinion is going to change.
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Summary: How to use and deploy Window2000 without a mouse.
Review: I concur with the other reviews that I have read in that this is the best book on Windows 2000 that I have read and one of the best computer books I have ever read.The most unique quality is the excellent explanation of how to use scripting to maximize your results and minimize your effort. This book is especially well suited to the enterprise audience that has to deploy many servers (100+) and not just 1-10. If you have even a small bit of programming experience you will really appreciate the in-depth explanations of Windows 2000 under the covers.
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Summary: It's all in here...
Review: I have an extensive library already on Active Directory. When I first got my hands on this book I wanted to test it out, see if it was worth adding to my collection. So I played a little game, I thought of things that should be in here, then looked in the book to see if they were there. This treasure hunt went on for a while consistently finding that the topics that should be in here are in here... So I switched tack, I started to read the index and see what I wouldn't expect to be in, if it was I'd be impressed... I was and am very impresses. Very soon I was hooked, this book really does explain the answers to many questions that commonly come up. There's a lot of books out there that explain Active Directory, but few that answer those nitty-gritty questions. This is one that does! Even if you've got a bookshelf full of AD books, check this out, it's a must... Well done Sakari and Mita..
Rating:
Summary: Active Directory all the way
Review: I salute Sakari and Mika on the best written Active Directory book ever. I found it most valuable, understanding AD in an precise knowledgeable way, they know what they are writing about. It was an 5 star complement to Minasi and his Mastering Windows 2000 Server. Great!
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Summary: The STANDARD for Active Directory Administration
Review: I'm not sure what book the unimpressed reviewer below read, but it certainly wasn't this book. I've been a senior Active Directory Engineer at one of the largest international companies in the world for the past 2 1/2 years. Our implementation of Active Directory is one of the largest and most complex out there. Due to this, I've been searching everywhere for books that go beyond the 'beginning to intermediate' concepts that seem to dominant in other books. With 'Inside Active Directory' I've truly found it. The way I tell if a book is worth its salt is to check some of the esoteric topics I've encountered, and see if the book covers them. I can say that I've yet to find something that these guys didn't cover in depth. Just the treatment on Security and Group Policies alone makes the book worth the cover price. But they don't stop there. They go through Active Directory with a fine-toothed comb and explore every nook and cranny, showing you details you'll never find anywhere else. As an example, see if you can find other books that give you details on using the LDP tool to view deleted items. Or see how many other books talk about SDDL (Security Data Definition Language) that's used to establish default permissions for all object classes (including how to modify them). Or how about the overview of how Active Directory uses LDAP? The only other book I've found that goes into this depth is the 'Windows 2000 Server Distributed Systems Guide' that's part of the Windows 2000 Resource Kit. But it was much drier than this one, and even it had areas that it didn't cover. Trust me on this one...if you're an Active Directory engineer or architect, this is the book you need. It's the companion that's going to help you keep your job if you're up in the middle of the night trying to understand how something works or why it's not working. It's truly an amazing book. Well done, guys! I hope they write an update for this soon to cover AD 2003!
Rating:
Summary: The ideal "how to" reference and highly recommended
Review: Inside Active Directory: A System Administrator's Guide is a complete, detailed, thorough, comprehensive, single-volume reference specifically designed for managing Active Directory, the foundation technology within Windows 2000 distributed networks. From design, architecture, and topology, to deployment, management issues, and administering an entire network operating environment, Inside Active Directory is the ideal "how to" reference and a highly recommended reference ideal for the novice and invaluable for even the more experienced user.
Rating: 
Summary: Average AD book
Review: Not sure what all the fuss about this book is over. I found the writing style to be dry and unimaginative. I found the chapters to be difficult to read and the explanations of the myriad of AD concepts to be quite difficult to follow at times. Overall, this is a book that is packed with the nuts and bolts of AD, I just can't make it past the desert dry writing and the poor conceptual explanations.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely the Best Single Book on AD
Review: Quite simply it is the best guide to Active Directory in a single book. The quality of writing is superb, it has the benefit of appearing a couple of years after the release of W2K and you can tell that the authors know their subject. I found information in this book that I have never seen anywhere else (like what AdminSDHolder does)! A direct competitor to this book would be Alistair G. Lowe-Norris "Windows 2000 Active Directory" but IMHO that book does not have the benefit of 2 years experience in the real-world. Highlights are the chapters on AD security, replication, schema management and group policy. There are also two superb chapters on ADSI scripting. However, there are some things it doesn't cover (wisely in my opinion as it would become too large). Specifically it does not cover migration or deployment planning. It also does not cover DNS planning in depth. These topics are large enough to require books on their own. All in all if you want serious in-depth technical detail on managing AD, explained clearly and precisely (rare qualities in technical books) then this is the book to go for.
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Summary: Not for the beginner or the sleepy.
Review: Read the Microsoft documents, white papers and manuals on the Microsoft web site instead. This book offers no easier approach to understanding than the techno-drill available from Microsoft.
Who writes these reviews anyway? I can't believe anybody really liked this book.
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Summary: design a p2p network with these ideas?
Review: So this is what became of X.500? Well, ok, not literally. But some of you may remember in the early 90s when X.500 came out and was heralded as the definitive way to implement a distributed directory service. But, for various reasons, it proved impractical and very few places actually implemented it.
What this book shows is how Microsoft took the best ideas of X.500 and redone, along with other ideas, into Active Directory. Impressive capabilities, as thoroughly discussed by the authors. And also seemingly very practical, unlike the unlamented X.500.
For those of you from a unix background, you might be familiar with NFS and the setup of a master server and slave servers. This maps into the idea of domain controllers for AD domains. But you can easily see here that AD far extends the scope.
Perusing the book also led me to this off the wall observation. In AD, you hold data that is essentially static. That is, it should change only on a time scale longer than the propagation time for changes to reach all the domains. And the data should be small. (A few kilobytes at most.) For a set of many domains, AD uses a global catalog to restrict the scope of searches, instead of those going out to all domains. The point is, this is a critical problem in many p2p networks. So if you are thinking of building a novel p2p network, you might want to study how AD tackles the issue. Though this book nowhere makes this comparison to p2p, as far as I can tell.
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