Active Directory is an important offering by Microsoft, primarily for use within its .NET Framework. What Kaplan and Dunn suggest here is that the programmer-level documentation for Active Directory being furnished by Microsoft is somewhat awkward to use and understand. So this book is offered. The context is how to code LDAP in the namespace of System.DirectoryServices. The code examples are from both .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0. Though the reader should probably migrate to 2.0 anyway, as this is significantly improved over 1.1. Also, the examples are given in C#. If you are an experienced VB coder, you should still be able to easily follow the C# logic. The code examples are brief enough to enable that, and C# is a very clean language, notationally. Part 2 of the book is probably the key section for most readers. You might be trying to integrate a corporate-wide directory with other applications. Perhaps to authorise those applications, depending on a valid user, as given by Active Directory, say. So Part 2 delves heavily into user and group management. For the latter, its definition and populating it with users is shown to be straightforward. From which you can build higher level logic.