Two years ago, the Internet Engineering Task Force began studying directory protocols, searching for a solution to outdated protocols. That search prompted the creation of LDAP, the new protocol for inter-network directory services. Since that time, Microsoft, Netscape, IBM, Novell and other companies have adopted LDAP as a complete directory services solution. This is the essential resource for programmers, software engineers, and network administrators who need to understand and implement LDAP to keep software applications compliant. If you design or program software for network computing or are interested in directory services, LDAP: Programming Directory-Enabled Applications with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is an essential resource to help you understand the LDAP API; learn how to write LDAP programs; understand how to LDAP-enable an existing application; and learn how to use a set of command-line LDAP tools to search and update directory information.

Amazon.com Review
Tim Howes's LDAP: Programming Directory-Enabled Applications with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is a very useful and (given the technical subject matter) surprisingly readable guide to the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), the preferred protocol for providing directory services on today's Internet. The book provides a solid introduction to what LDAP is, including its history and architecture, and then proceeds to cover LDAP API programming via C and C++ in clear, discrete examples that range from simple searching to filtering, reading, and updating LDAP directories. More advanced topics include asynchronous LDAP programming with threads, as well as building a command-line LDAP search utility. For programmers, this text is useful because of its overall clarity, although it also covers some of the specifics of developing in LDAP on Windows 95/NT, Macintosh, and UNIX. Non-programmers will also find the chapters on using command-line versions of LDAP (available in Netscape's implementation) to be very useful. The authors even provide examples of programming LDAP utilities through scripting in Perl, as LDAP applications can be prototyped using scripting languages first, then coded in the actual API using C/C++. On the whole, this is an exceptionally clear book that covers this valuable protocol extremely well.