Book Review:
Active Directory Cookbook for Windows Server 2003 & Windows 2000
By Robbie Allen
O’Reilly & Associates, Inc.
ISBN 0-596-00464-8
Rating: 4 stars out of 5 ****
I’ve needed to learn a lot about Active Directory (“AD”) in a hurry because the organization I work for is moving from the Novell NDS (eDirectory) platform to Microsoft AD on a pretty aggressive schedule, and we have virtually no in-house understanding of AD. The Active Directory Cookbook by Robbie Allen has been one of my principal resources as I’ve tried to learn as much as possible in as short a time as possible to effectively facilitate our move. So far, it has answered all my questions, and I expect to continue using it as we get into the migration further and further.
I don’t know much about VBScript, but it looks like the scripts in this book can be pretty easily utilized without any knowledge of how they were actually written. Perl scripts are not in the book, but are available on the author’s Web site (www.rallenhome.com/books/adcookbook/code.html).
The book contains hundreds of step-by-step solutions for many types of problems one might encounter with Active Directory, including areas such as LDAP, multi-master
replication, DNS, Group Policy, and the Active Directory Schema. Each “recipe” includes graphical, command line, and scripting examples so you can use the tools that suit
you best.
The format of the books is similar to other O’Reilly “cookbooks” (such as Perl Cookbook, Java Cookbook, etc.). Each of the 18 chapters has 10-30 recipes for performing a specific AD task. And each recipe has four sections: the problem, a solution, discussion, and “see also” (pointers to other recipes, Microsoft’s Knowledge Base, and the like).
NOTE: This is not the only book you’ll want in your library for dealing with AD. The cookbook is designed to be used in conjunction with O’Reilly’s Active Directory.
This book review is prepared by Al Trick and was presented at the Saint Louis Visual Basic Users Group at the September 2004 meeting.
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