Active Directory Cookbook

If you are the kind of person who doesn't really understand something until they've actually had hands-on experience with it, this is *the* book to learn LDAP and Active Directory. I have 5 other books on LDAP/AD (really) and it's only after running the scripts in this book that it all snapped into focus. Download the scripts, modify them for your environment, run them, study them, and you'll be praising the author as I am. Although all the scripts are in VBScript, Perl translations are available on-line. I don't think you can find this information any where else, which leads me to ask, "How did the author figure it all out?"

I'm a Senior Network Security Engineer for a consulting firm and I support over 1,000 companies, local county governments, public school systems, state and local law enforcement and this is one book that doesn't go unused. What can I say. It's one of the best books I've found to include examples in GUI, command-line, and scripting all-in-one! I've always enjoyed Oreilly books, they are some of the best publications on the market. Robbie Allen has included many recipes in here that took time for me to find on my own, or figure out on my own. Now I have a complete resource at my finger tips! I have a lot of computer books, about 40 books in the Oreilly publications alone including almost every PHP and Perl book published and I've got to say this is one I keep in the car with me all the time.

I have been working with Active Directory for a while and I have seen my share of books for Active Directory administration, but this one is the best I have come across in a great while, Allen takes step by step thru the different ways of getting the task done in AD 2000/2003 and it has saved me a lot of time.And to top it all I needed a script from the book I went to Robbie Allen's website and he personally sent me all the scripts from the book. That shows me a writer that stands 100% by his product.

While there are a good number of decent AD related books out there, from my QA perspective, the AD Cookbook is a big boon. I picked up the book last weekend and am already saving hours of effort by automating many of the laborious and time consuming AD -UI activities. The book is very simple in terms of targeting individual segments of managing an AD setup and management like Users, domains,Sites, OUs, Groups and so on. You can flip the pages to right where you want to be and pick up a script without having to read the first 'n' pages of the book to know what the script means or is trying to do. There is no starting from the basic 'Hello World' and building an application around it from the beginning to the end of the book. The scripts stand out on their own and are independent of other samples.In addition to the Vb and perl scripts provided in the book and accompanying website, there are also directions on implementing the same operation using the UI and command line. This should cover the entire domain of users who want to do anything or everything with their Active Directory Services.I strongly recommend the book for system admins and other people who would like to manage their Active Directory, without having to delve through voluminous books where the information is there, but not visible to the 'conventional naked eye' or through tomes of documentation in MSDN.

The most detailed and concise book I have ever read. I am an Engineer and have not done much with scripting, this book makes it clear and simple. You can download all the examples from the web site and modify as needed. I have used this book to write a web site my Help staff uses to pull real time reports out of AD. The script for finding stale accounts saved me weeks trying to verify and locate dead computers. A "Must" have for anyone dealing with Active Directory along with "Managing Enterprise Active Directory" This is the most valuable book I have in my libary. Buy It, don't even think twice, you need this book!!