Active Directory Cookbook, 2nd Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)If you are the kind of person who doesn't really understand something until they've actually had hands-on experience with it, this is *the* book to learn LDAP and Active Directory. I have 5 other books on LDAP/AD (really) and it's only after running the scripts in this book that it all snapped into focus. Download the scripts, modify them for your environment, run them, study them, and you'll be praising the author as I am. Although all the scripts are in VBScript, Perl translations are available on-line. I don't think you can find this information any where else, which leads me to ask, "How did the author figure it all out?"

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If you're among those looking for practical hands-on support, help is here with Active Directory Cookbook, Second Edition, a unique problem-solving guide that offers quick answers for Active Directory and updated for Window Server 2003 SP1 and R2 versions.

The book contains hundreds of step-by-step solutions for both common and uncommon problems that you're likely to encounter with Active Directory on a daily basis--including recipes to deal with the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), ADAM, multi-master replication, Domain Name System (DNS), Group Policy, the Active Directory Schema, and many other features. Author Robbie Allen, a Technical Leader at Cisco Systems, MVP for Directory Services, and co-author of Active Directory, Third Edition and Laura E. Hunter, MVP for Windows Server-Networking and author of several books, have based this collection of troubleshooting recipes on their own experience, along with input from Windows administrators. Each recipe includes a discussion explaining how and why the solution works, so you can adapt the problem-solving techniques to similar situations.

This best selling book provides solutions to over 300 problems commonly encountered when deploying, administering, and automating Active Directory to manage users in Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. The recipes include:

creating domains and trusts
renaming a domain controller
finding users whose passwords are about to expire
applying a security filter to group policy objects
checking for potential replication problems
restricting hosts from performing LDAP queries
viewing DNS server performance statistics

This Cookbook is a perfect companion to Active Directory, Third Edition, the tutorial that experts hail as the best source for understanding Microsoft's directory service. While Active Directory provides the big picture, Active Directory Cookbook gives you quick solutions you need to cope with day-to-day dilemmas. Together, these books supply the knowledge and tools so you can get the most out of Active Directory to manage users, groups, computers, domains, organizational units, and security policies on your network.

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Second Life: The Official Guide Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This book was a major disappointment.
There is very little How TO info in the book if you are not planning to create objects and try to make money in the sim. If you are just a visitor who wants a pleasant time sightseeing and chatting with others, then this book will disappoint.
A large part of the book is a tribute to selected SL residents who have made money in the sim. Nice for them, but who else cares?
Another chapter describes interesting specific locations in SL. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the sites are obsolete and gone.
Even if you are interested in learning scripting language to try to sell products in SL, there have got to be better instructional manuals out there than this.
When I had real HowTo questions, the answer was rarely found in the book.
I truly felt I had wasted my money in purchasing this book. You can learn as much useful info at the initial Help Islands and inworld tutorials once you enter SL.

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Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)As a full time Senior Linux System Administrator in real life I was quite interested to get my fingers on this book for a review. After all, the job of a smart sysadmin pretty much dictates scripting away as much of your work as possible. We are a lazy bunch and we call that being efficient
This is the first book I have reviewed by Packt Publishing or the author, Sarath Lackshman, I wasn't really sure what I was in for. In fact I was slightly put off by the price, which I initially thought overly hefty at $45 US. For that kind of scratch I am used to seeing a much more substantial sized book from the sort of publishers I normally review for. I started making my way through the book anyway, and I am glad I did.
What makes this book really cool is the premise behind it. Inside, as a "cookbook" should, you have these "recipes" for scripts. These are not what I have normally seen in many scripting books before, which are generally theoretical and sometimes lengthy examples, but these recipes are pretty straight forward, real world examples of things you might want to do, and how to handle those efficiently. The recipes are also small enough that you could easily piece meal things out to compose another script and I am certain that would be a great help to novice scripters.
As nice as I think this book would be for novice scripters, there is a lot of smart stuff in there, stuff that had never occurred to me through my years of command line use. I actually got really excited to try some of the examples in there and to put them into practice. I particularly liked the little tricks here and there, like the "subshell trick" and I was absolutely thrilled that this book used modern syntax and variable manipulation, dropping the deprecated stuff like putting commands into back ticks. Good form!
This book is certainly a keeper and I would recommend it highly to anyone who wants to become proficient on the command line. Some days you actually *do* get what you pay for, and I believe people will find this book to be a good example of that. This book was truly fun for me to work my way through and I sure hope they have more like it in store for the future. Go buy yourself a copy. I know I will be hanging on to this one for a while

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This book is written in cookbook style and it offers learning through recipes with examples and illustrations. Each recipe contains step-by-step instructions about everything necessary to execute a particular task. The book is designed so that you can read it from start to end for beginner's or just open up any chapter and start following the recipes as a reference for advanced users. If you are a beginner or an intermediate user who wants to master the skill of quickly writing scripts to perform various tasks without reading the entire man pages, this book is for you. You can start writing scripts and one-liners by simply looking at the similar recipe and its descriptions without any working knowledge of shell scripting or Linux. Intermediate/advanced users as well as system adminstrators/ developers and programmers can use this book as a reference when they face problems while coding.

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