Customer Reviews

Active Directory Cookbook for Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000

5 star:		(66)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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!!

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.

Book Review: Active Directory Cookbook for Windows ® Server 2003 and Windows ® Server 2000
Pages: 622
Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates; (September 2003)
ISBN: 0596004648
Rating: 9/10
Rater - Carlos Magalhaes - Active Directory Programming MVP

About the author - Robbie Allen has been authoring books for quite some time now. I have been following every release. Robbie has a wonderful writing style that allows for quick and enjoyable reading. This book is no exception. Robbie has a thorough knowledge of Active Directory; he recently was awarded the MVP award from Microsoft (well done, Robbie!) and is highly respected in the Active Directory community.

Hidden gems - Being a technical reviewer myself for many Active Directory and Windows Server books, very often are the technical reviewers forgotten in a book review. To Rick Kingslan, Gil Kirkpatrick, Tony Murray, Todd Myrick, Joe Richards and Kevin Sullivan: well done guys! Your efforts along with Robbie's have made this book a true gem.

Audience - I am among the fortunate few that have the job title, "System Developer and System Administrator" (both a blessing and a curse!). I can however confirm that this book is well suited for both audiences. There is no constraint on which scripting language to use either. Robbie provides both VBScript and Perl examples for most of his code samples, they are easy to follow and with the additional knowledge this book provides, easy to expand on.

What this book is not - This book is not an Active Directory Programming book. It does not go into the depth of detail about certain points (as it is not the objective of the book) like Active Directory Second Addition by O'Reilly does, but covers the points that are important very well.

Quick Overview of Inside the book - The book is comprised of 18 chapters. (The chapter headers below are my personal abbreviations for the chapters)

Chapter 1 - The stage is set.
This chapter covers the basics about what scripting languages and tools that will be used and any issues to take into consideration.

Chapter 2 - Core Architecture is important!
The importance of how to create and maintain your Forests, Domains and trusts is explained in this chapter.

Chapter 3 - Who Runs my Network Operating System (NOS)?
The servers that are regarded as the back bone of the network your Domain Controllers, Global Catalogs and FSMO's all important tasks that one has to do on a daily basis is covered in chapter 3.

Chapter 4 - Ohh objects where are you?
To me an important advantage (and there are many more) that Windows ® 2003 and Windows ® 2000 have over the older NOS is that the searching capability is enhanced and no object can hide. Chapter 4 covers Searching and Manipulating objects.

Chapter 5 - The Holding cells of objects
This chapter covers the creating and maintenance of Organizational units.

Chapter 6 - And of course who could forget the users.
Want to find out just about everything you can script for the user object? Then this chapter is for you.

Chapter 7 - How do I herd my users?
People live in communities (like Tony Murray's ActiveDir.org or http://groups.yahoo.com/group/adsianddirectoryservices) and active directory caters for these groupings by allowing users to create (no prizes) Groups. Chapter 7 covers creating and maintaining groups.

Chapter 8 - Computers
Chapter 8 is for you if you need to create and maintain your computer objects.

Chapter 9 - Rules, Rules, Rules!
And of course if you have ever managed a group of objects you have to apply some rules. Create and maintain your Groups Policy Objects with this chapter.

Chapter 10 - The big boss
With every wonderful creation there has to be a boss or in this case a backbone. This chapter is very important, covering important points to remember about your Active Directory Schema.

Chapter 11 - How do I build my site?
Network topology can be tricky. Use the scripts in this chapter to help you find out more about your sites.

Chapter 12 - Hey why don't I have that object on my directory partition?
Replication is such an important part of Active Directory. One of the most neglected areas with Active Directory. Chapter 12 provides some invaluable scripts.

Chapter 13 - Nice to meet you but who are you?
Domain Naming System (DNS), imagine we had to live in a world where there where no names. Ever wondered how to modify DNS server configurations using a script? Chapter 13 has your answer.

Chapter 14 - Are you really who you say you are?
This chapter can not be missed, with the internet pretending to be what it is not, this chapter covering Security and Authentication is a must.

Chapter 15 - "You network is as good as your auditing"
A famous person once said, "You won't know what's wrong until you ask". Dive into the world of logging, monitoring, auditing and setting quotas with this chapter.

Chapter 16 - Bang, now what?
How many times have I been called in to "fix" a very sick Active Directory installation and I find out backups have not been working for months! Please take time and read this chapter, the scripts and advice on Backing up, Recovering , important DIT maintenance and watching those deleted objects can save people like me hours of work.

Chapter 17 - I know about Domain Partitions but what are Application Partitions?
If you do not know what an application partition is or does, chapter 17 is for you!

Chapter 18 - But I use the .net Framework
This chapter is dedicated in explaining how to use the different technologies and programming languages with Active Directory.

My Verdict

A wonderful book for overworked Administrators that really don't have the time to go through the learning curve of scripting, the book provides the code snippets there ready to use. And if you don't feel like typing them out here is the download link for the entire source code for the whole book. http://www.rallenhome.com/books/adcookbook/code.html

Robbie, well done, this is a great book.

I highly recommend this book. I have used it frequently in the past 15 months. It offers solutions/ways to approach various tasks one might want to "automate" within an AD implementation.

What I really like is how the authors tried to provide multiple choices in how to do accomplish a task. Typically it's thru some form of scripting ro use of visual basic/.net, or the use of WMI/ADSI queries.

This Cookbook is the best selling of the Active Directory books. But you should know that there is a new Second Edition simply called Active Directory Cookbook that was revised by Joe Richards, the MVP and it has a lot of good stuff on topics like ADAM and updates for SP2. So get that.

This book is priceless and worth its weight in gold. This is the book to use when you want to do something with AD and don't know how to. Rather than search the net, I refer to this first.

It has explanations for all the quirks in AD and is a great how to book.

Have also used the code from this book to automate many functions and setup quality assurance checks for AD.

Looking forward to the Exchange cookbook.

A must have book for dealing with AD. I primarily bought book for some scripting help with AD, however, after seeing book, it's great whether you are using Command Line, GUI, VB, or Perl (from web site). The discussion after each topic is also very informative. So no matter what method you are using, this book will describe how to do it.