Implementing LDAP provides a lot of information about Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) from the points of view of administrators and developers. The administration and configuration material emphasizes Netscape Directory Server 4, but it pays a fair amount of attention to OpenLDAP. (Microsoft Site Server 3 receives no mention.) In addition to product-specific coverage for administrators, there's quite a bit of general information about what LDAP is and how it works--the kind of information you'll need to decide whether LDAP implementation is worthwhile.

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.

In this book, Jeffrey Hughes and Blair Thomas provide a blueprint for unifying network administration and use. Readers who skip the introductory chapter to get to the meat will miss a critical part of this book. The first chapter lays out the remaining portions of the book in careful detail, pointing out the interplay between the two network operating systems. The first chapter gives the NT point of reference for the NDS chapters that follow. The remaining chapters cover topics such as NDS objects, scaling, fault tolerance, NDS access methods, and time synchronization. The last two chapters focus specifically on NDS and NT.

Novell's NDS Developer's Guide is a no-nonsense compendium of the various techniques for programming for Novell Directory Services (NDS)--the company's cornerstone architecture for distributed network resource management. The book is authored by several Novell engineers and addresses both high-level and low-level programming techniques.