Ian Waters - PowerShell for Beginners: Learn PowerShell 7 Through Hands-On Mini Games

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Welcome to PowerShell for Beginners. I wanted to write this book to provide engineers and software developers a fun way to learn how to write scripts using PowerShell. My background is in IT support, I help to run an IT support company, and part of my job involves writing scripts to make our lives easier. Many of our own engineers struggle with scripting and struggle to learn the basics because it seems so daunting to get started and many find it boring. PowerShell really is easy to learn, and Ive written this book to make it an enjoyable process by making it fun and engaging. Throughout this book, you are going to start with the very basics and learn what tools you need and how scripts can be structured and how you can write code to perform the tasks you need and build up your own useful set of PowerShell tools.

Each chapter will take you through a specific how-to guide, and each chapter will build on top of the previous chapters, and eventually you will start to write mini games old-school style!

If you are of a certain age over 30, then you will likely have fond memories of games with simple graphics but that were super fun. My favorite computers growing up were the BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC 464, and Amiga 500, and as a young boy, I enjoyed writing little games. No one ever played them, but I enjoyed doing it and learned to program much easier because it was fun and working out how to build something from nothing was rewarding.

Programming and writing scripts is a skill I still use to this day and will continue to use for the rest of my career in IT. The time you spend studying the content of this book will be well worth the time and effort.

I hope that this book works in the same way for you and provides you with a step-by-step guide on how to develop your own scripts and serves as a useful reference manual for the future. If you ever need to read or write to files in your script, just jump to Chapter . This is a great book for learning the basics and for referring back to when you need them.

In previous books Ive written, people have said, Why do I need a book when I can learn everything I need from the Internet? Well, you absolutely can and you should and will likely go looking for code on the Internet.

Whats different with this book compared to articles on the Internet is that everything you need to get started is here. Everything is in one place and laid out in a specific way to accelerate your study of PowerShell and writing your own code.

All of the code has been checked and runs without errors, and all of the text has been verified by trusted experts in the field. Also, this book has been written with one aim all the way through, which is to learn PowerShell in a fun way without taking it or ourselves too seriously.

We will write code together, and you will begin to understand it, and you will start breaking it apart to build your own things. Steal any code in this book for your own projects, break it and modify it to automate tasks, or simply set up a networked version of PowerBomber in your office and see who will be the office champion! PowerBomber is one of the mini games you can build later in this book!