Customer Reviews

Professional ADSI Programming- Active Directory Services Interface

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

 

 

If you are programming directory-enabled applications/COM+ objects, this book is your salvation. Robinson makes it easy to learn the basics about directories, and what they can do for you. It has a lot of great information on how to program the Active Directory in Win2k, as well as IIS and Windows NT. If you need to use ADSI, you need this book. Well done.

Its not a bad book if you are trying to get an overview of ADSI and have no prior experience with it but its certainly not the "professional" book it claims to be. The code snippets are amateurish. The editing is slipshod and there are several ambiguous sentences and even occasional grammatical errors. The code samples show you the very obvious things that you could learn by experimenting with the interfaces yourself. The author somehow does not seem to trust the intelligence of his readers and makes the samples repetitive - there are atleast a dozen samples that just iterate through various collection classes and spew stuff into a webpage. He also breaks off into frequent discourses about COM and ADO that are rather elementary. It would have instead been reasonable for him to just proceed on the presumption that we knew our basics on these subjects. Still its not a bad book for a novice to skim through.

This book provides a little of everything that is ADSI. From programming in Visual Basic, to Scripting, to C+. And from Active Directory, to LDAP, to Microsoft Management Console. I would recommend this book if you know alot about programming, a little about ADSI, and you are looking for sign posts to direct you along the way.

The main thing I garnered from this book is how many areas are directly or indirectly effected by ADSI. ADSI is not just for Microsoft Active Directory; ADSI supports LDAP and Novell NDS directories as well.

ADSI can be accessed using Microsoft COM+, OLE DB, or even ODBC. This book touches on each of these access methods, but not in great depth. For instance, the section on ADSI and Exchange Server, IIS, and Site Server, is a scant 30 pages.

"Professional ADSI Programming" is ideally suited as a roadmap to guide you to specific areas of ADSI development. You will need specific references, such as Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), to provide the detail absent from this book.

At times the author gets side tracked from the topic he is trying to cover. This is more the fault of the editor than the author.

This is an excellent book for administrators who are trying to learn how to program using ADSI. There are lots of great examples and the author's writing is easy to read. It also contains many other useful details on Windows 2000. You can expect to go from nothing to being able to code up some meaningful programs after you read this one. If the ADSI documentation in MSDN leaves you wondering what the heck is going on then this is your book! I continue to reference the book and it will be well worn before I move on... Well done Simon!

The book is an awful mishmash of ADSI programming concepts. Being a developer with a strong C++ background, I found it very confusing to follow the samples presented in the book, which are written in VB, VBScript, VBA and C++. The last straw for me was a VBA sample for Excel.

One of the topics that is covered poorly is property cache. The differences between cached and non-cached properties are layed out without any consistency and complicate the matter even more.

Besides, constant references to Spice Gilrs and Boy Zone make the book laughable to say the least.

The bottom line---it takes much more to write a good ADSI book than a couple of months of surfing documentation and putting it all together in a book.

If you need to learn ADSI fast and to implement it fast and with a good understanding, You're in the right place. Mr. Robinson as usual by the way, is a fun writer simply take the advantage on that and don't waste your time in MSDN as i did. I said to myself OK that shouldn't be that complicated it is just an Interface to tree... Well it is just an interface but now i understand how it works. I also like the mix and much of VB and C which gives one a good understanding of COM's back house work.

If you want to spend $50 for the heaps of tedious descriptionof SIMPLE ADSI programming skill, buy this book, and you'll surely bedisappointed.

This book is so verbose and artless, the author likes to overwhelm reader with so, so many personal comments, most of them completely unnecessary! WHY couldn't he just describe the FACT, the simple FACT and simple SKILL of ADSI programming?

Only going through the first chapter makes me feel so headache, I just want to know HOW to use ADSI to develop LDAP-compliant Directory service, WHO cares about HIS comments, what seems to the author humorous comments seems to me SO boring!

Maybe the author is proficient in ADSI programming, but I suggest him learn the concise and clear writing manner.

In this book about less than 35% is useful, more than 55% is useless comments, the rest depends on your judge. END

I first read this book to teach myself ADSI and the book really covers all the topics required to writte an application related to Active Directory (What I did using VB). You certainly can expect to cut and paste coding examples into your own application but all the requirements from a sound understanding are there. In summary I found the book very usefull and it is a musst to understand all the piece of code that you could find around.