A little blog for a restless mind

LDAP

The life goes on, and so does my discontent. There's this huge book in my office about LDAP, 800 pages, Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services. I've yet to find a book with more junk content. There's also a new version of it, but as far as I can tell the ratio usable:junk hasn't significantly changed. I want to learn something about LDAP as I shall use it in that web portal mentioned in the previous post. Nowadays it's everything about having data about users in a directory, directories are just the structures for whatever persistent data that doesn't change a lot or not at all, and databases are meant for everything else. Right, but I have no idea about LDAP other than some overall theory. I want to learn how to interface with an LDAP server, how it works, how and what kind of data does it devour, how to design a directory, in short how and in what format to stick some data in it and then how to pull it back out. Well, this book is precisely the one you wouldn't want to learn from about technical stuff like that. Sure it's got it covered somewhere. All over the place to be totally inexact. Dispersed in an ocean of smalltalk a technical manager without a practical clue could have given you in a local pub for a lot cheaper price of, say, a beer. I mean it. This book is for managers and pointy-haired bosses that won't write a line of code about it, but perhaps a strategic company plan for whatever mega integrated solution designed for centralized data acquisition and storage with a comprehensive and open approach to development that is required by circumstances of modern international trading or whatever. If you want, I can throw a lot more of useless words at you, but I think you got the gist of it. That's just how this book is written. I don't like it. ldapguru shall do just fine, thank you very much. I'm very curious though who around here will find this book useful.

posted by AlesS @ 7/02/2004 07:48:00 PM