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Summary: Microsoft Windows 2000 Active Directory Programming
Review: As a newcommer to ADSI by being "thrown into the arena" by the departure of another programmer, I found this book to be an excellent starting point to not only clear up problems I was having with my "inherited" programs, but also by seeing the power of AD and how to work with it programmatically, I was given ideas for additional features in existing programs and also for a couple of new tools to make life for our help desk people a bit easier.
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Summary: Excellent Book on Active Directory
Review: Charles takes the mystery out of Active Directory Programming. I found the book very easy to read and understand. Active Directory was explained to me as a difficult and complicated technology. This book explained a lot about Active Directory in a simple and clear manner. Anyone who uses Active Directory, whether a developer or system administrator, should have this book in their library.
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Summary: Looking for a practical Active Directory programming guide
Review: I am a system administrator and have been trying to figure out how to implement the new for 2000 management strategies that are built in to the OS. I had looked around for a while and had found lots of obtuse examples in various places that did not make it easy for me to teach my staff how to write management code for AD.I found this book on the web, and found that it has insightful examples and well written descriptions of both black box internals and how the system needs to be touched. Charles does a great job of demonstrating script, vb, and c++ snippets that actually work. Now my technicians have a significant library of scripts based on snippets from this book. It is a great book for Admins and developers trying to make the 9x to NT leap, or professional developers needing a new opinion. I highly recommend this book to those who need to know how to search the AD, create LDAP queries, write login scripts that interact with the forest, etc. A very valuable book for any toolbox.
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Summary: Only one problem with this book, It need a security Chain.
Review: I have found only one problem with this book. It needs a security chain built in to lock it to my desk. It has an annoying tendency to get barrowed when I am not ask my desk.
I would suggest that Amazon bundles it with "how to train your Doberman to guard your computer books"
I would recommend that any who likes this book, check out Charles Oppermanns other book that is the sequel of this integrated with dot.net. It is here at Amazon under the title "Programming Directory Services with Microsoft .Net and Xml".
The only problem is that Microsoft canceled it.
Maybe if enough of us ask for them to release it....
I have taken a lot of information in this book and integrated it with dot.net on my own. But it's my belief that we need the Sequel.
Joe.
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Summary: Great book!
Review: I recently needed a book to get started doing some ADSI programming, this helped me achieve what I needed.
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Summary: Covers everything you need to know
Review: I wrote this book to be the only book you'll need to start working with Active Directory. Whether writing a large-scale distributed application, or creating administration scripts for managing Windows 2000 networks, this title covers it. The book starts out with an introduction to and a history of directory services. The architecture of Active Directory is examined along with a listing of the benefits of this technology. A comparison of the LDAP and ADSI programming interfaces is also provided. All the basics are explained, including object access, searching, enumeration and replication. Understanding and extending the Active Directory schema is also thoroughly covered. Chapters cover managing users and network resources using VBScript. The CD-ROM includes scripts for integrating with Exchange 2000. Unique to this title is a chapter on how to use the Active Directory user interface elements in your own program. Using property sheets, class icons, and query forms is covered and shown with examples so you do not have to recreate the AD UI. The final chapter covers ASP and IIS integration with Active Directory and previews the changes and new features that will appear in Windows.NET 2002. Most samples are provided in C++ and Visual Basic source code. Many samples are provided in VBScript as well. The CD-ROM includes dozens of complete and reusable sample programs - no source code fragments or editing required. Also on the CD-ROM is the complete documentation set for Active Directory, including detailed listings of each schema object and the properties available. Diagrams of the ADSI object model are also included, along with a fully searchable electronic copy of the book. The ADSI and relevant sections of the Platform SDK is included to ensure you can be working with the technology as quickly as possible.
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Summary: Covers everything you need to know
Review: I wrote this book to be the only book you'll need to start working with Active Directory. Whether writing a large-scale distributed application, or creating administration scripts for managing Windows 2000 networks, this title covers it. The book starts out with an introduction to and a history of directory services. The architecture of Active Directory is examined along with a listing of the benefits of this technology. A comparison of the LDAP and ADSI programming interfaces is also provided. All the basics are explained, including object access, searching, enumeration and replication. Understanding and extending the Active Directory schema is also thoroughly covered. Chapters cover managing users and network resources using VBScript. The CD-ROM includes scripts for integrating with Exchange 2000. Unique to this title is a chapter on how to use the Active Directory user interface elements in your own program. Using property sheets, class icons, and query forms is covered and shown with examples so you do not have to recreate the AD UI. The final chapter covers ASP and IIS integration with Active Directory and previews the changes and new features that will appear in Windows.NET 2002. Most samples are provided in C++ and Visual Basic source code. Many samples are provided in VBScript as well. The CD-ROM includes dozens of complete and reusable sample programs - no source code fragments or editing required. Also on the CD-ROM is the complete documentation set for Active Directory, including detailed listings of each schema object and the properties available. Diagrams of the ADSI object model are also included, along with a fully searchable electronic copy of the book. The ADSI and relevant sections of the Platform SDK is included to ensure you can be working with the technology as quickly as possible.
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Summary: "The" AD Programming book
Review: Learning to Program to the Active Directory is made easier by choosing the book that is right for you, you could start on the 'Net by immersing yourself in msdn.microsoft.com and the AD SDK material but if you are like many people you need to 'have the right info at your fingertips' and this MS Press book by Charles Oppermann contains the right dose of material to assist you in your AD-enabled project! Other books such as Kirkpatrick or Robinson dive into different aspects of AD programming in more depth (especially if you are C++ inclined) while Oppermann chooses to cater towards both beginning and experienced AD programmers.Many programmers will discover some new pointers and 'best practices' that they will find to be of use!. If I could cherry pick among the various AD/ADSI books available I would augment Oppermanns excellent book with Chapter 18 of the O'Reilly book by Alistair G.Lowe-Norris on Permissions and Auditing. In short even if you are now moving to System.DirectoryServices under .NET you will want a copy of Charles Oppermanns' Active Directory Programming for your AD programmers toolkit!
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Summary: Using it extensively in my work
Review: My job is centered around Active Directory including architecture, manipulation and troubleshooting. I am currently writing code to perform schema modifications and bulk updates to existing objects and I have found this book to be an extremely good reference. While I am using several books including the Microsoft VB 6 reference manuals and Active Directory Developer's Reference Library (along with the excellent O'Reilly "Windows 2000 Active Directory" tome) I have found Charles Oppermann's effort to be at least as good as the others and in terms of examples and explanations perhaps a bit better. I highly recommend this book as a good reference for those writing VB to manipulate Active Directory (I don't write C code but the samples are also plentiful.)
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Summary: Great book!
Review: There is a lot of good AD information in this book, but a lack of focus makes you wade through too much extraneous information. The author continually get sidetracked, for instance two pages are spent discussing Visual Basic's On Error mechanism and a straightforward error reporting function; a full page on how C++ handles strings with _TCHAR; too much time explaining Windows Scripting Host, including emphasis boxes; etc. This 417 page book could have imparted the same AD knowledge in about 300 pages. Finally, my plea to all future authors - enough with the 5-20 page explanation of COM. If someone is not a COM developer yet, your mini-thesis is not going to make the difference. There are plenty of excellent texts for new developers. This author takes it to the extreme, continually going over fundamental COM issues (BSTR's, FAILED(), etc.) throughout the book. Choose a target audience, preferrably a COM knowledgeable developer, and focus all explanations on that target audience. All that being said, it's not a bad book, it just pressed all my personal hot buttons repeatedly.
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