| | | Active Directory Administrator's Pocket Consultant, by William Stanek Introduced by Maria Gargiulo, content development manager, Microsoft Learning No one knows more about our excellent upcoming title Active Directory Administrator's Pocket Consultant than its author, William Stanek. The best-selling author of nearly 100 books, and series editor for the Administrator's Pocket Consultants, William discusses his approach to his most recent Microsoft Press title in the following article. For information on William's many other books, visit his Web site, www.williamstanek.com. Yesterday, my newest book for IT professionals, Active Directory Administrator's Pocket Consultant, shipped. As the author of nearly 100 books, I've written about many different server technologies and products, but one of my favorites has always been Active Directory. When Microsoft introduced Windows 2000, the most important change was the inclusion of Active Directory. Active Directory is based on standard Internet protocols and has a design that helps you clearly identify the physical and logical components of your network's structure. Although Active Directory offers many great benefits, it continues to be a challenge for network and system administrators to design, implement, and support. Active Directory Administrator's Pocket Consultant provides system and network administrators, developers, programmers, and other IT professionals with a clear, detailed look at Active Directory for Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, and beyond. The upgraded Active Directory that ships with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 Release 2 has new and enhanced features, and this book answers the questions of what the changes are, how you can take advantage of the changes, and why you'd want to use the new features in the first place. Having written many Windows books, I was able to bring to this book the perspective gained from working with the underlying technologies for many years. Long before Active Directory was created, I was working with, researching, and writing about the predecessor software. The advantage for you, the reader, is that my solid understanding of these technologies allowed me to dig into the architecture and provide a comprehensive view. As you've probably noticed, there's a lot of information about Active Directory on the Web and in other printed books. There are tutorials, reference sites, discussion groups, and more to help make it easier to work with Active Directory. However, the advantage of reading this book is that all the information you need to deploy and run Active Directory is organized in one place and presented in a straightforward fashion. This book has everything you need to customize Active Directory installations, master Active Directory configuration, and maintain domain controllers. While the book won't necessarily replace a 1,000-page reference, it does offer unique insights and is focused on accomplishing the task at hand. In this book, I teach how features work, why they work the way they work, and how to customize them to meet your needs. You'll also learn why you may want to use certain features, and when to use other features to resolve any issues you are having. For example, when I discuss sites and subnets, I cover guidelines for establishing site boundaries and creating subnets. I discuss configuring Active Directory so clients find appropriate domain controllers. I talk about configuring site links and replication between sites. I suggest when to bridge sites and specify how to configure site bridges. I also provide extensive guidelines for monitoring, verifying, and troubleshooting site links and replication between sites. In addition, this book provides tips, best practices, and examples of how to optimize Active Directory to meet your needs. |
For Developers
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Excerpt from the book's Foreword, written by Microsoft Press author and Wintellect co-founder John Robbins:
We still have a long way to go before our field is a real engineering field, but the signs are encouraging. I think a big change will occur when we finally start treating testing as a real profession—one that is equal to or more important than development. While I probably won't see the transition to software engineering before I retire, I'm very encouraged by the progress thus far. Let's all keep pushing and learning so we can finally really be called engineers.
This book, Solid Code, is a great step in the direction of treating software as an engineering discipline. Bookstores' programming shelves groan under two types of development books. The first kind is the hand-waving software management type, and the second is the gritty internals of a technology type; I'm guilty of writing the latter. While those books have their uses and are helpful, the type of books we are missing are the ones that talk about real-world team software development. The actual technology is such a small part of a project; it's the team and process aspects that present the biggest challenges in getting a software project shipped. Solid Code does a great job of hitting that super-hard middle ground between the management books and the technology books. By covering ideas from how to model software to security design to defensive programming, John and Donis show you how the best practices you can apply to your development will make it even better. Reading Solid Code is like experiencing a great project led by a top development manager and working with excellent coworkers.
The whole book is excellent; I especially loved the emphasis on planning and preparation. Many of the projects that my company, Wintellect, has had to rescue are the direct result of poor planning. Take those chapters to heart so you'll avoid the mistakes that will cost you tons of money and time. Another problem the book addresses is the tendency to leave performance tuning and security analysis for the very end of the project. As the title of Chapter 4 so succinctly points out, "Performance Is a Feature." The recommendations in those chapters are invaluable. Finally, the book's emphasis on real-world coding and debugging will pay dividends even when the code goes into maintenance mode. Even though I've been working in the field nearly 20 years, I picked up a lot of great ideas from Solid Code.
Every developer needs to read this book, but there are others in your company who need to read it as well. Make your manager, your manager's manager, and your manager's manager's manager read this book! The one question I always get from senior managers at any company is "How does Microsoft develop software?" With the Inside Microsoft sections in most chapters of Solid Code, your management will see how Microsoft has solved problems in some of the largest applications in use today. Now start reading! It's your turn to help move our industry into a real engineering discipline!
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