title: LDAP Books link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2004/10/30/ldap-books/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 757 created: 2004/10/30 15:26:00 created_gmt: 2004/10/30 15:26:00 comment_status: open post_name: ldap-books status: publish post_type: post

LDAP Books

Every once and awhile someone asks me to recommend a book or two about LDAP. Fortunately all of these requests so far have been from people looking for a good introduction to the topic, and not for something providing advanced techniques along the lines of Mastering Regular Expressions(O’Reilly) or the Perl Cookbook(O’Reilly). Introductory texts on LDAP abound, most follow the pattern of spending their first half explaining the protocol, its accompanying API, and giving a few examples. This is in stark contrast to the LDAP-derived Active Directory, which now can boast several advanced tomes, including my favorites, Robbie Allen’s Active Directory Cookbook(O’Reilly) and his older Managing Enterprise Active Directory Services (Addison-Wesley).

About the best introductory book I’ve found is also one of the more recent, Gerry Carter’s LDAP Administration(O’Reilly), which covers alot of ground for a book that’s supposed to focus mostly on OpenLDAP (here’s a secret, while OpenLDAP is used as an example LDAP directory through the book, Gerry actually provides a pretty balanced presentation of generic LDAP, including some space on Active Directory). For IT managers, the recently updated Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services (Addison-Wesley) provides the best resource for architectural issues. Those managing a Sun Directory environment will find the Sun Blueprints series title LDAP in the Solaris Operating Environment somewhat helpful, although most of the material there appears to be a rehash of the manuals (which are actually pretty good as software manuals go, the Deployment Guide and Command Reference, are must-reads).

For a directory administrator like myself, unfortunately, there is currently no advanced book to help with the practical day to day problems of synchronizing (which is really just a function of “transforming” and then “diffing” entries) directories, writing connectors to non-LDAP systems and best practices for data management. While all the books currently out there provide examples of code using the Netscape SDKs and PerLDAP, these tools are now pretty long in the tooth, and don’t have the price/performance punch of the current Sun Java/JNDI and the pure Perl Net::LDAP (a/k/a perl-ldap) offerings. To Gerry Carter’s credit Net::LDAP gets good coverage in his book (as it does in Robbie Allen’s older book, only marketing forces can explain why he went pure VBScript in his newer writings). For OpenLDAP administrators there still is no book with coverage of tuning the Berkeley DB backend, which as I’ve pointed out elsewhere on this blog is a critical task if that product is to be used in an enterprise environment. What is missing, and sorely needed, is an “LDAP Administrator’s Cookbook” and a companion “Advanced LDAP Directory Management” to cover best practices.

I am, of course, open to any offers.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo