WIN32 Perl Scripting: The Administrator's Handbook

This book is just awesome in that it covers different Windows libraries from Perl. The material is rather advanced in both usage of Windows libraries and Perl language usage. The topics are organized in common administrative areas. I felt the ADSI and WMI coverage was just really brief; perhaps I just want more of this good stuff. I definitely hope this chapter can be expanded in a future edition. One thing that was amazing is that Roth demonstrates how to investigate the LDAP schema of Active Directory, which is rather useful when you need to search for properties, and need to know what those properties actually are. Nothing from Microsoft that I found, documents how to do this for VBScript; I did find some rather scary C++ code that alludes this functionality, but Roth not only demonstrates it, but shows how it can be used. Anyone serious about scripting and Windows administration should snatch this book like yesterday. It will undoubtedly be an essential resource for any IT department.

If you need to automate administrative tasks, ignore the O'Reilly Perl-Admin books, this one has a lot more substance and a very little fluff.Dave Roth is a prolific author of many very popular Perl modules for 32 bit Windows operating systems: Win32::Daemon, Win32::Perms, Win32::ODBC, Win32::AdminMisc, and many others. He is also an active participant in the Perl WinNT Admin mailing list This guy has a lot of real world experience with Perl and Win32. He's solved a lot of difficult problems. More than that, he does a great job of regularly taking the time to document and convey that knowledge on to others. The book is a great distillation of that knowledge.

Concise, well written, pragmatic, and lots of exemplary code. If you need to automate administrative tasks, ignore the O'Reilly Perl-Admin books, this one has a lot more substance and a lot less fluff.Dave Roth is a prolific author of many very popular Perl modules for 32 bit Windows operating systems: Win32::Daemon, Win32::Perms, Win32::ODBC, Win32::AdminMisc, and many others. .... This guy has a lot of real world experience with Perl and Win32. He's solved a lot of difficult problems. More than that, he does a great job of regularly taking the time to document and convey that knowledge on to others. The book is a great distillation of that knowledge.

If you use Perl on Win32 you need THIS book. There is plenty of good material elsewhere on Perl for Unix/Linux; and plenty out there on platform-independent aspects of the Perl language. But the "Camel" book (Programming Perl 3rd Edition, by Wall, Christiansen and Orwant) and all the other excellent standard sources don't help you with Win32 specific tasks. This book shows examples for managing user and machine accounts, leveraging event logs, using Perl scripts to do any admin task. Running Perl scripts as services. Even the very latest Win32 things like WMI and ADSI. I use this book as a companion to "Win32 Perl Programming: The Standard Extensions" also by Dave Roth, which helps with OLE automation and such.Get the "Camel" book, this book, and ActiveState Perl and you will be all set to do whatever Perl thing you please on Win32.

Majority of Perl books deals with UNIX. However in a real world, whether you like it or not, most IS departments have to deal with Windows NT/2000 servers. These departments also require knowledgeable administrators to take care of this environment. Here is where this book comes in handy. The author, also known from his previous book (WIN32 PERL Programming. The standard extensions) shows us how we can use Perl to do day to day tasks on Windows Servers. The book offers many ready to use scripts and also explains the rationale for using techniques, the way it was used in this book. I rated this book 5 stars because not only it enriched my knowledge but also it saved me many hours of trying to write similar scripts on my own. In essence: A must have!