Shepard M. - PowerShell Troubleshooting Guide

Michael Shepard has been working with computers since the early '80s, starting with an Apple II in school and a Commodore 64 at home. He started working in the IT industry in 1989 and has been working full-time since 1997. He has been working at Jack Henry & Associates, Inc. since 2000. His focus has changed over the years from being a database application developer to a DBA, an application admin, and is now a solutions architect. In his years as a DBA, he found PowerShell to be a critical component in creating the automation required to keep up with a growing set of servers and applications. He is active in the PowerShell community at Stack Overflow and projects at CodePlex. He has been blogging about PowerShell since 2009 at http://powershellstation.com.

I'd like to thank my employer, Jack Henry & Associates, Inc., for allowing me the freedom over the last few years to both learn and teach PowerShell. My wonderful wife, Stephanie, and my children, Simeon and Gwen, also deserve thanks for humoring me when I can't stop talking about PowerShell, and for giving me some breathing room to write.

Christian Droulers is a late-blooming software developer. He only started programming in college and has not stopped since. He's interested in beautiful, clean, and efficient code.

Steve Shilling has worked in the IT industry commercially since 1987, but started with computers in 1982 writing BASIC programs and debugging game programs written by others. He has broad knowledge about Unix, Windows, and Mainframe systems. He primarily lives in the Unix/Linux world automating systems for deployments and businesses, and has spent many years working in system administration, software development, training, and managing technical people. He remains in the technical field of expertise providing knowledge and experience to companies around the world to make their systems stable, reliable, and delivered on time. His experience has taken him through many different industries covering banking and finance, insurance services, betting exchanges, TV and media, retail, and others, allowing him to have a unique perspective of IT in business where most have only worked in one industry.

Steve works for TPS Services Ltd., which specializes in IT training and consultancy, life coaching, management training, and counselling. The IT part of TPS Services Ltd. specializes in Linux/Unix systems for small, medium, and large organizations, and the integration of Linux and Windows systems.

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Preface

PowerShell Troubleshooting Guide uses easy-to-understand examples to explain the PowerShell language, enabling you to spend more of your time writing code to solve the problems you face and less time agonizing over syntax and cryptic error messages. Beginning with the foundations of PowerShell, including functions, modules, and the pipeline, you will learn how to leverage the power built into the language to solve problems and avoid reinventing the wheel. Writing code in PowerShell can be fun, and once you've learned the techniques in this book, you will enjoy PowerShell more and more.

What this book covers

, PowerShell Primer , provides a brief introduction to some of the most important entities in the PowerShell language including cmdlets, functions, scripts, and modules. A special emphasis is placed on the importance of the pipeline in PowerShell operations.

, PowerShell Peculiarities , includes a number of features of the PowerShell language, which are unusual when compared with other mainstream programming languages. Examples of these topics are output from functions and non-terminating errors.

, PowerShell Practices , shows a few ways that the scripting experience in PowerShell can be improved, either in performance or in maintainability. A lengthy discussion of the various output cmdlets is included.