I always referred to the php.net LDAP functions pages
http://php.net/manual/en/ref.ldap.php and got most of my info from there. I will say that there is one aspect of LDAP that doesn't really work well in PHP and that is subtree searches against a W2K3 Active Directory. For whatever reason, PHP LDAP doesn't chase referrals properly which means that you might successfully connect to and bind to domain.com, but a search for userprincipalname=j* will fail if the users whose account names start with J are in a subdomain DN, like allthejs.domain.com
A tool that I found to be VERY helpful in making sure I knew I could even connect to the LDAP server was LDP.exe, a free tool you can find on the MS site.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/d ... laylang=enALso, I just realized you're trying to do ldapS. That's brave. One stumbling block for me was that it seems you DO need to connect to the thing using ldap_connect('ldaps://domain.com', 636); Also, make sure you have the ldap module enabled in php.ini, as well as the ssl module.
I hope that's a good start. Plug away at it and if you have further specific questions, maybe I can help.