2003-06-14 Pretty good, although could have been deeper

First off, the coverage of administering LDAP, in particular the OpenLDAP server, is excellent. Choosing to focus on OpenLDAP is wise since commercial directory service products tend to cost a lot of money and aren't things that you can casually play with (or, as in my case, develop software against). His chapters on putting directory services to work - using LDAP ro replace NIS, using it for authentication and integration with other LDAP services - are very good as well.

However, the coverage of what directory services are could be deeper. The author acknowledges that some explanation is required, and provides some background information but not nearly enough. In a future edition I would like to see more coverage of directory schemas and more about the object types that can be stored in a directory. In addition, I would like to see coverage of the LDAP protocol itself. There is also a strong Unix bias, but this is not such a concern since there are plenty of dedicated books for Active Directory (including a good O'Reilly one).

As a bonus, there is a very good chapter for Perl developers using the Net::LDAP module. As a Java developer, I would have liked to have seen JNDI as well, but kudos even so to the author for remembering us.