An in-depth look at LDAP, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. At 846 pages, there is nothing lightweight about this hardcover book. It starts with an overview, history and introduction to LDAP. It covers designing, piloting and deploying a dirctory service. There is considerable detail in the discussing all the steps required to deploy a directory service in any size enterprise. The authors worked very hard at presenting a vendor neutral discussion of the topic, even though they all work for Netscape Communications Corporation, one of the leading commercial vendors of directory server products.

Many pages are devoted to how to plan you implementation, how to pre-test before full scale deployment and how to scale up your deployment are included. How to backup and recover your ldap directory server are discussed, in general terms. The last chapter covers case studies of deploying directory services.

I think the book spends a little too much time discussing the project management aspects of directory service implimentation. Much of the information, in my opinion, would be better suited for a book on project management, and was too general to be of great use. Had I been the editor, the book would probably have been half the number of pages. The parts that were specific to LDAP were quite good. This isn't surpising, given the background of the authors.

Timothy A. Howes was one the original authors of the Internet LDAP directory protocol. Mark C. Smith and Gordon S. Good were both intrumental in the development of the University of Michigan's LDAP implementation, from which OpenLDAP was spawned.

Overall I found the book to be very helpful in understanding LDAP and would recommend it to anyone planning to deploy a directory service.