the abcs of ldap
I was looking for a good book on LDAP and ran across The ABCs of LDAP by Reinhard Voglmaier. Even though, according to Amazon, it's not a very popular book, it's the best book on the subject I've found yet.
This book has a nice balance of theory and practice. It starts out with the basics of the LDAP protocol in a very readable tone. From there, it slowly blends in each different topic of LDAP very smoothly. For example, one of the first hands-on pieces of the book shows you how to add objects to LDAP via the command line. It then shows you how to search for those same objects. Though the reader doesn't know it yet, the format these examples are using is standard LDIF -- so when it's time to use LDIF files, the reader thinks, "Oh! I know this already!"
OpenLDAP is the implementation used in the book, but there's also footnotes throughout the text giving hints to the reader on other LDAP packages. Everything about LDAP is covered here: the basics, networking, replication, system administration, and programming. The programming section was particularly useful with the added bonus of example code in 4 languages.
So overall, I'm extremely impressed with this book. Why it isn't more popular is beyond me. Maybe it's the steep price tag, but I personally think it's worth it. I give it a 9/10.
