There is growing interest in a standard way of providing access to personal information (e.g. "white pages" data) and simplifying the administration and management of this data. LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is poised to be the solution to these problems. Since the IETF recently approved version 3 of the LDAP protocol, it is now rapidly growing in importance as major companies seek to make their proprietary networks available as LDAP servers. Implementing LDAP comes at a time when programmers everywhere consider LDAP as the answer to their developmental needs. No prior knowledge of LDAP is assumed as an in depth discussion of the fundamentals of LDAP - its data structure, object hierarchy and syntax - is provided. Client applications are then presented, in a variety of languages, designed to connect efficiently and securely to an LDAP server, search and retrieve information, and modify the data on the server.