operating systems

Thanks Robbie

I love the books (AD First-Second Edition / AD Cookbook); you have done a great job in detailing the Scrip procedures in the AD Cookbook.
Love the index and tool list. A must get for any Sys Admin / Architect.
As a "Batch er & KIX32 er" I had a hard time getting my head
around VBs or PL your book helped me a great deal.
Appreciate the fact that you are proposing script examples in Perl, VBS, Ldifde or CMD to get the job done. The only suggestion I have more as a question: List a example of a skeleton template vbs script parsing through a excel or csv file for specific User tasks / import via ADSI adding great flexibility in adding Cookbook Recipes to the template as needed. That would be perfect;-).
Also i have owned the Active Directory First edition and enjoyed the technical details.
Great job thank you Robbie

Joseph

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.

So often with "cut and paste" solution titles, the reader is given a book that assumes no experience on behalf of the user, and wastes a great deal of print on telling you how to open notepad or the command prompt and very little time answering many of the "but wait..." questions that arise from implementing their solution without knowing what you're doing. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this isn't the case with this book.

Don't pick this up unless you are familiar with the environment you are using; the author makes the assumption that you understand Windows and the Active Directory already. Formatted exactly as needed, this reference book (find what you need, rather than a cover to cover read) provides solutions which 95% of the time are native to the "out of the box" environment without need for additional downloads or installs. When you do need a download, its a Microsoft provided add-on and not a third party shareware. The solutions are usually provided as a GUI walk-thru, command line overview and a VBScript example, making this title much more useful than others as it does not alienate administrators of various levels.

With over 320 solutions in 17 different areas, this is recommended Active Directory reference addition for applicable administrators.