Who Should Read This Book?

As with many of the books in the Cookbook series, the Active Directory Cookbook can be useful to anyone who has to deploy, administer, or automate Active Directory. This book can serve as a great reference for those who have to work with Active Directory on a day-to-day basis. And because of all the programming samples, this book can be really beneficial to programmers who want to get a jumpstart on performing certain tasks in an application. For those without much programming background, the VBScript and Perl solutions are straightforward and should be pretty easy to follow and expand on.

The companion to this book, Active Directory, Second Edition from O'Reilly, is a great choice for those wanting a thorough description of the core concepts behind Active Directory, how to design an Active Directory infrastructure, and how to automate that infrastructure using Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Active Directory, Second Edition does not describe how to accomplish every possible task within Active Directory; that is the purpose of this book. These two books, along with the supplemental information described in Recipe 1.5, should be sufficient to answer most questions you have about Active Directory.