Don Jones - Learn PowerShell Toolmaking in a Month of Lunches

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I have a unique outlook on scripting. In my first career as an aircraft mechanic, I worked with machinistsfolks who used tools and dies to carve metal into aircraft parts. A step above machinist, career-wise, was the tool and die maker. Those were the highly-trained folks who actually created the tools and dies used by machinists. Folks aspired to be toolmakers, as they were nicknamed, because it was considered a bit cushier job. You didnt work on the hot shop floor around screaming machines and flying shards; you worked in a cool office, on a computer-aided design (CAD) station. You wore nicer clothes.

It turns out that PowerShell can be treated in much the same way. Imagine working in a nice, cool office, with no users demanding your attention. You cruise through your organizations help desk ticketing system, looking for recurring problems that eat up a lot of time, or that end up having to be solved by higher-tier technical staffers. You write tools, in PowerShell, to solve those problems. You deploy those tools to the help desk and your lower-tier colleagues. They can now solve those problems more quickly and more consistentlyand with less involvement from you. Your job is cushier. Maybe you get paid more, too. Sounds awesome, right?

Itll happen. That same pattern has repeated itself, over and over, throughout the history of IT, in almost every corner of IT except the Microsoft space, mainly because we havent had the right tool-making tools. Well, we do now: Windows PowerShell. If youre ready to stop thinking like a button-clicker and command-runner, and to start thinking like a toolmaker, youve picked up the right book.

D ON J ONES

Most of what youll need to know about this book is covered in , but there are a few things that we should mention up front.

First of all, if you plan to follow along with our examples and complete the hands-on exercises, youll need a virtual machine or computer running Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012. We cover that in more detail in . You can get by with Windows 7, but youll miss out on a few of the hands-on labs.

Second, be prepared to read this book from start to finish, covering each chapter in order. Again, this is something well explain in more detail in , but the idea is that each chapter introduces a few new things that you will need in subsequent chapters. You shouldnt try to push through the whole bookstick with the one chapter per day approach. The human brain can only absorb so much information at once, and by taking on PowerShell in small chunks, youll learn it a lot faster and more thoroughly.

Third, this book contains a lot of code snippets. Most of them are quite short, so you should be able to type them easily. In fact, we recommend that you do type them, since doing so will help reinforce an essential PowerShell skill: accurate typing! Longer code snippets are given in listings and are available for download at http://Morelunches.com (just click on this books cover image and look for the Downloads section).

That said, there are a few conventions that you should be aware of. Code will always appear in a special font, just like this example:

Get-WmiObject class Win32_OperatingSystem computerName SERVER-R2

That example also illustrates the line-continuation character used in this book. It indicates that those two lines should actually be typed as a single line in PowerShell. In other words, dont hit Enter or Return after Win32_OperatingSystemkeep right on typing. PowerShell allows for very long lines, but the pages of this book can only hold so much.

Sometimes, youll also see code font within the text itself, such as when we write Get-Command. That lets you know that youre looking at a command, parameter, or other element that you would type within the shell.

Fourth is a tricky topic that well bring up again in several chapters: the backtick character (`). Heres an example:

Invoke-Command scriptblock { Dir } `-computerName SERVER-R2,localhost

The character at the end of the first line isnt a stray bit of inkits a real character that you would type. On a U.S. keyboard, the backtick (or grave accent) is usually near the upper left, under the Escape key, on the same key as the tilde character (~). When you see the backtick in a code listing, type it exactly as is. Furthermore, when it appears at the end of a lineas in the preceding examplemake sure that its the very last character on that line. If you allow any spaces or tabs to appear after it, the backtick wont work correctly, and neither will the code example.

Frankly, itd be easier to just download the code samples and not worry about typing them in. Theyre posted at http://MoreLunches.comjust click on this books cover image and head for the Downloads section.

You can also download the code from the publishers website at www.manning.com/LearnPowerShellToolmakinginaMonthofLunches.

Finally, well occasionally direct you to Internet resources. Where those URLs are particularly long and difficult to type, weve replaced them with Manning-based shortened URLs that look like ).

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