I have had this book on my shelf for awhile. I wanted to make room so I gave it a read.
Overall, it's an ok book for a primer. I don't know if it's a good choice for the beginner. Especially, if the beginner does not like reading theory.
Normally techno theory does not bother me. But for some reason, the theory chapters bored me. I don't know why they just did.
Keeping in mind the primer vision; I think greater detail could have been given to DNS since it is usually the culprit behind many AD problems.
I liked that the author spent some time on sites and replication as I have seen this cause many problems for new administrators.
There is a section on design but it's pretty small and the chapters on installation and management are ok.
There was little mention of the support tools (dcdiag, netdiag, replmon,...) which I think could be gone over more as they are often overlooked.
The final sections deal with migration of NT and Novell. I haven't come across a Novel conversion but I have performed the NT migration. Overall, it's ok but I would suggest the downloadable cookbook from Microsoft when it comes time to migrate. That is if there are anymore conversions going on.
Again this is an ok book for the noob but an experienced person probably will not like it.
I am not keeping my copy.