Nevertheless, I plunged forward and made the purchase in the hopes that the authors (co-authors of the LDAP spec) would be another Kernighan and Ritchie-type duo.

Very little background (and I consider it to be essential) is presented on LDAP. Instead, the authors plunge immediately into code examples. Futhermore, the URLs shown in the code don't work (granted the book was published in 1997). In short terms, there's not much here that can't be gleaned from the man pages or looking at the OpenLDAP source code.

The saving grace of the book reside in the appendices and in chapter 17, "Using the Copmmand Line LDAP Tools". These pages alone (and they constitute a good chunk of the book's volume) are sufficient to make my investment in this volume not wasted. It is hoped that the authors update this title. As recognized authorities on LDAP, they have the means to produce *the* canonical volume on ths subject.

I had a hard time getting the referenced LDAP distribution running, and once I did I found other resources to be of more service. It helped me get a base prototype running, but if I had to develop an LDAP system for production use, I'd probably just buy a package rather than build one myself (and using this book for reference.) My time is more valuable that this.

Its too bad they can't just roll the first three chapters into a far cheaper book. In the end that was the most valuable part, and you could have easily published that content on the web.

Get a used version, or borrow a friend's.

Both the University of Michigan and Netscape libraries are covered, and the advantages/disadvantages of each. This book also breifly explains command line utilities, such as ldapsearch, that are useful for testing and debugging applications.

The book contains a useful reference of the core LDAP APIs that I keep handy when I am programming.

Another section I found useful pertains to LDAP and threading in applications. The threading section covers information that is very important when developing server applications using LDAP.