Thanks to Michael Bender, who has selflessly provided a technical review of the book. Any remaining errors are, of course, still the authors fault, but Michael has been tireless in helping us catch many of them.
About the Authors
Don Jones received the Microsoft MVP Award recipient for 16 consecutive years for his work with Windows PowerShell and administrative automation. He has authored dozens of books, articles, white papers, and instructional videos on information technology, and today is a Vice President in the Content team at Pluralsight.com. Don was also a co-founder of The DevOps Collective, which offers IT education programs, scholarships, and which runs PowerShell.org and PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit and other DevOps- and automation-related events.
Dons recent writing focuses on business, instructional design, self-improvement, and fiction, and can be found at http://leanpub.com/u/donjones. You can follow Don on Twitter @concentratedDon. He blogs at DonJones.com.
Jeff Hicks is a grizzled IT veteran with almost 30 years of experience, much of it spent as an IT infrastructure consultant specializing in Microsoft server technologies with an emphasis in automation and efficiency. He is a multi-year recipient of the Microsoft MVP Award. He works today as an independent author, teacher and consultant. Jeff has taught and presented on PowerShell and the benefits of automation to IT Pros worldwide for over a decade. Jeff has authored and co-authored a number of books, writes for numerous online sites, is a Pluralsight author, and a frequent speaker at technology conferences and user groups world-wide.
You can keep up with Jeff on Twitter (@JeffHicks) and on his blog at https://jdhitsolutions.com.
Additional Credits
Technical editing has been helpfully provided not only by our readers, but by Michael Bender. Were grateful to Michael for not only catching a lot of big and little problems, but for fixing most of them for us. Michael rocks, and you should watch his Pluralsight videos. However, anything Michael didnt catch is still firmly the authors responsibility.
Foreword
After the success of Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, Jeff and I wanted to write a book that took people down the next step, into actual scripting. The result, of course, was Learn PowerShell Toolmaking in a Month of Lunches. In the intervening years, as PowerShell gained more traction and greater adoption, we realized that there was a lot more of the story that we wanted to tell. We wanted to get into help authoring, unit testing, and more. We wanted to cover working with different data sources, coding in Visual Studio, and so on. These were really out of scope for the Month of Lunches series format. And even in the main narrative of building a proper tool, we wanted to go into more depth. So while the Month of Lunches book was still a valuable tutorial in our minds, we wanted something with more tooth.
At the same time, this stuff is changing really fast these days. Fast enough that a traditional publishing process - which can add as much as four months to a books publication - just cant keep up. Not only are we kind of constantly tweaking our narrative approach to explaining these topics, but the topics themselves are constantly evolving, thanks in part to an incredibly robust community building add-ons like Pester, Platyps, and more.
So after some long, hard thinking, we decided to launch this effort. As an Agile-published book on LeanPub, we can continuously add new content, update old content, fix the mistakes you point out to us, and so on. We can then take major milestones and publish them as snapshots on places like Amazon, increasing the availability of this material. We hope you find the project as exciting and dynamic as we do, and we hope youre generous with your suggestions - which may be sent to us via the author contact form from this books page on LeanPub.com. Well continue to use traditional paper publishing, but through a self-publishing outlet that doesnt impose as much process overhead on getting the book in print. These hard copy editions will be a snapshot or milestone edition of the electronic version.