RE: ldap-mail-routing

[V Alex Brennen <vab@cryptnet.net>]

On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, Tom Thomas wrote:

> I just looked this book up on Amazon...gee - it got a lousy review:
> 
> [snip]
>
> Do other readers in this forum agree?

Yes.  I have a copy here in front of me and it is a terrible book.
First, it's mis-titled.  It's about installation not administration.
Second, it's just rephrased or directly reprinted content from
readme's, man pages, rfcs, and web pages.

The book is basically focused on deployment, it's essentially 
a catalog of the free software out there with no real insight 
into how to structure a solution or your topology.  The author
appears to have basically downloaded and compiled the software,
loaded a small amount of test data into the directory, and 
transcribed his notes on the process thereby producing the
book.

The book doesn't cover performance tuning, ACL tuning, load
balancing, trouble shooting, or backup and recovery.  There's
basically no "administration" content in the entire book. 
The book even misses basic critical points in deployment which
have been discussed several times on this list and would have
be obvious struggling points for someone who deployed openLDAP
in a production environment.  For example, in the section on
NIS integration, UID number and GID number allocation isn't even
mentioned even though NIS deployment makes up about ~10% of
the content in the book.  The other solution deployment 
sections have similar short falls. Even basic openLDAP
compilation isn't well covered - no mention of what to
consider when trying choose the right backend db is made.

The author, Gerald Carter, seems to have no qualifications from
from O'Reilly says about him in the book.  O'Reilly's main 
selling point on him is that he is one of the SAMBA programmers,
but he "currently works on embedded printing appliances at HP"
and no mention of any LDAP experience is present.  I don't 
think he's ever admin'd a large directory or done a large LDAP
deployment and topology design.

You definitely want to avoid this book.  If you just read the
HOWTO's floating around on the web and the INSTALL files 
that come in the software archives you essentially will have
read the exact same content at no cost.

I don't understand why a publisher would put out a book that's
basically just a reprint of INSTALL instructions.  Isn't
the idea to put out books that value add through the 
communication of real world experience and knowledge.  This 
book won't give you any insight, or any solid skills 
transfer in regard to administration.  It won't even 
save you from struggling with the common challenges of LDAP
deployment, even though that's what the book seems to be 
about.

This book just plain sucks.


Sorry,

	- VAB