On Tue, 13 Mar 2007, Howard Chu wrote:
I'm starting to see too many mistakes in "http://www.zytrax.com/books/ldap/" to trust it now. Or, for that matter, Howes/Smith/Good (1st Ed).
Only starting? Tim Howes' book was authoritative, a lifetime ago. Living technologies evolve.
Some here regard Howes' book as a bible; indeed, it gets recommended from time to time. Is the 2nd edition any better?
The Zytrax stuff looked like a nice effort at first, but as usual, I question the motives. People who genuinely want to help others spend time doing exactly that, in public forums. People who genuinely want to improve the state of the OpenLDAP documentation do exactly that, by contributing docs and patches to the Project. People who sit off in their corner of the world proclaiming their authoritative knowledge about a piece of technology that they otherwise have made no visible contribution to strike me as just being leeches. Even worse when their docs are full of errors.
Which in turn illustrates the dichotomy of the problem: those in the best position to document something i.e. the developers themselves are the very ones who cannot (because they're too busy) or should not (because they are too close to it, and take things for granted). This got drilled into me around 25 years ago, at a DEC device driver course.
On the other hand, Open Source has no official Documentation Department.
On the gripping hand, end-users will document that which they do not understand...
On a slightly related topic - the first several chapters of my OpenLDAP Administration book will be published on the web in a few months. Even after it comes out on paper, we'll be revising the electronic copy over time. It's somewhat unavoidable that documenting OpenLDAP is a moving target - only dead things stop moving.
I'll certainly purchase it.