This is a Leanpub book. Leanpub empowers authors and publishers with the Lean Publishing process. Lean Publishing is the act of publishing an in-progress ebook using lightweight tools and many iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build traction once you do.
For Chris for everything.
About This Book
The Forever Edition of this book is published on LeanPub, an Agile online publishing platform. That means the book is published as we write it, and that means although you may not have a complete book right now, you eventually will - and well also be able to revise it as needed. We also appreciate your patience with any typographical errors, and we appreciate you pointing them out to us - in order to keep the book as agile as possible, were forgoing a traditional copyedit. Our hope is that youll appreciate getting the technical content quickly, and wont mind helping us catch any errors we may have made. You paid a bit more for the book than a traditional one, but that up-front price means you can come back whenever you like and download the latest version. We plan to expand and improve the book pretty much forever, so its hopefully the last one youll need to buy on this topic!
Youll also find this book offered on traditional booksellers like Amazon. In those cases, the book is sold as a specific edition, such as Second Edition. These represent a point-in-time snapshot of the book, and are offered at a lower price than the Agile-published version. These traditional editions do not include future updates.
If you purchased this book, thank you. Know that writing a book like this takes hundreds of hours of effort, during which were not making any other income. Your purchase price is important to keeping a roof over our families heads and food on our tables. Please treat your copy of the book as your own personal copy - it isnt to be uploaded anywhere, and you arent meant to give copies to other people. Weve made sure to provide a DRM-free file (excepting any DRM added by a bookseller other than LeanPub) so that you can use your copy any way thats convenient for you. We appreciate your respecting our rights and not making unauthorized copies of this work.
If you got this book for free from someplace, know that you are making it difficult for us to write books. When we cant make even a small amount of money from our books, were encouraged to stop writing them. If you find this book useful, we would greatly appreciate you purchasing a copy from LeanPub.com or another bookseller. When you do, youll be letting us know that books like this are useful to you, and that you want people like us to continue creating them.
This book is copyrighted (c)2016-2017 by Don Jones and Missy Januszko, and all rights are reserved. This book is not open source, nor is it licensed under a Creative Commons license. This book is not free, and the authors reserve all rights.
About the Authors
Don Jones has been a Microsoft MVP Award recipient since 2003 for his work with Windows PowerShell and administrative automation. He has written dozens of books on information technology, and today helps design the IT Ops curriculum for Pluralsight.com. Don is also President, CEO, and co-founder of The DevOps Collective (devopscollective.org), which offers IT education programs and scholarships, and which runs PowerShell.org and PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit (powershellsummit.org).
Dons other recent works include:* Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches (Manning.com)* The DSC Book (LeanPub.com)* The Pester Book (LeanPub.com)* The PowerShell Scripting & Toolmaking Book (LeanPub.com)* Learn PowerShell Toolmaking in a Month of Lunches (Manning.com)* Learn SQL Server Administration in a Month of Lunches (Manning.com)
Follow Don on Twitter @concentratedDon, on Facebook at facebook.com/concentrateddon, or on LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com/in/concentrateddon. He blogs at DonJones.com.
Missy Januszko is an independent IT consultant, with more than 20 years of experience as an enterprise hosting architect, large-scale infrastructure designer, and hosted application designer. She specializes in DevOps, automation and configuration management, PowerShell, and Active Directory, and has broad experience across the entire line of Microsoft business technologies. Missy is a co-author of The DSC Book with Microsoft MVP Don Jones, and she is also a conference speaker on DSC-related topics.
Feedback
Wed love your feedback. Found a typo? Discovered a code bug? Have a content suggestion? Wish wed answered a particular question? Let us know.
First, please have a chapter name, heading reference, and a brief snippet of text for us to reference. We cant easily use page numbers, because our source documents dont have any.
Second, understand that due to time constraints like having full-time jobs, we cant personally answer technical questions and so forth. If you have a question, please hop on the forums at PowerShell.org, where we and a big community of enthusiasts will do our best to help.
Then, head to the LeanPub website and use their email link to email us. We cant always reply personally to every email, but know that were doing our best to incorporate feedback into the book.
Finally, accept our thanks!
A Note on Code Listings
The code formatting in this book only allows for about 60-odd characters per line. Weve tried our best to keep our code within that limit, although sometimes you may see some awkward formatting as a result.
For example:
1
Invoke-CimMethod
-ComputerName
$computer
`
2
-MethodName
Change
`
3
-Query
"SELECT * FROM Win32_Service WHERE Name = '$ServiceNa\
4
me'"
`
Here, you can see the default action for a too-long line - it gets word-wrapped, and a backslash inserted at the wrap point to let you know. We try to avoid those situations, but they may sometimes be unavoidable. When we do avoid them, it may be with awkward formatting, such as in the above where we used backticks (`) or:
1
Invoke-CimMethod
-ComputerName
$computer
`
2
-MethodName
Change
`
3
-Query
"SELECT * FROM Win32_Service WHERE Name = '$ServiceName'"
`
Here, weve given up on neatly aligning everything to prevent a wrap situation. Ugly, but oh well.
You may also see this crop up in inline code
snippets, especially the backslash.
If you are reading this book on a Kindle, tablet or other e-reader, then we hope youll understand that all code formatting bets are off the table. Theres no telling what the formatting will look like due to how each reader might format the page. We trust you know enough about PowerShell not to get distracted by odd line breaks or whatever.