Modern Authentication with Azure Active Directory for Web Applications

by Vittorio Bertocci

Build advanced authentication solutions for any cloud or web environmentActive Directory has been transformed to reflect the cloud revolution, modern protocols, and today’s newest SaaS paradigms. This is an authoritative, deep-dive guide to building Active Directory authentication solutions for these new environments. Author Vittorio Bertocci drove these technologies from initial concept to general availability, playing key roles in everything from technical design to documentation. In this book, he delivers comprehensive guidance for building complete solutions. For each app type, Bertocci presents high-level scenarios and quick implementation steps, illuminates key concepts in greater depth, and helps you refine your solution to improve performance and reliability. He helps you make sense of highly abstract architectural diagrams and nitty-gritty protocol and implementation details. This is the book for people motivated to become experts. Active Directory Program Manager Vittorio Bertocci shows you how Address authentication challenges in the cloud or on-premises Systematically protect apps with Azure AD and AD Federation Services Power sign-in flows with OpenID Connect, Azure AD, and AD libraries Make the most of OpenID Connect’s middleware and supporting classes Work with the Azure AD representation of apps and their relationships Provide fine-grained app access control via roles, groups, and permissions Consume and expose Web APIs protected by Azure AD Understand new authentication protocols without reading complex spec documents

Genres: Programming

798 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 17, 2015

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very specific book, for a very specific audience. If you just need to do some simple auth stuff with AAD, you probably don't need this book. It might be useful for background, but you probably don't need it. If you do need to dig into the guts of this stuff, then you might want to read this.

If you're not sure if this book is for you, read the introduction, specifically the "Who should read this book" section and the "This book might not be for you if..." section. That should help you set expectations.

This book was published in 2016, so it's already out of date in terms of some specifics, but the underlying concepts and low-level stuff is still applicable.

The text is reasonably clear and well-written, given the complexity of the subject matter. Honestly, i had some trouble working my way through some of it though. I don't know if that's just me, or if the text could be a little clearer. Probably a little of both.

[Valia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Given the title I expected to nod off every other page, instead I found a page-turner of a technical book and a very thorough introduction into the topic.

Also, love how he sneaks hair length into his examples :)

[Dean · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book looks useful, and presumably was when it was published. However, the information this book provides is now very out of date, to the point of adding confusion. Most of the examples are unusable due to changes in Azure since the book was printed. One or two chapters provide an overview, the main semi-useful parts of the book, but if you don't already know this topic in depth it's nearly impossible to tell which information is still accurate and which should be ignored. This book needs a complete rewrite.

[Alex Bilyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vittorio is great thinker, speaker and writer. He is like Jeffrey Richter in authentication :)

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bertocci does a good job in educating the user about foundation of Azure Active Directory. He writes clearly, defines precisely the abstract concepts into concrete objects and examples, and he substantiates his explainations with code snippets and diagrams.