Don Jones - Learn Windows PowerShell 3 in a Month of Lunches

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The closest thing Ive seen to a class in a book. Contains tons of useful exercises that instill PowerShell prowess by hands-on learning.

Chuck Durfee
Sr. Software Engineer, Graebel Companies

From beginners to intermediatethis is THE only book you need. Don Jones is a PowerShell superstar and in this book you will see why.

David Moravec
SCCM Administrator, PowerShell.cz

The seminal guide to learning Powershellhighly recommended.

Ray Booysen
Developer, BNP Paribas

The book I wish Id had when I started PowerShell!

Richard Siddaway
IT Architect and PowerShell MVP

This book not only teaches you PowerShell, it also teaches you to become an expert in PowerShell.

Nikander Bruggeman and Margriet Bruggeman,
.NET consultants, Lois & Clark IT Services

Weve been teaching and writing about Windows PowerShell for a long time. When Don began contemplating the first edition of this book, he realized that most PowerShell writers and teachersincluding himselfwere forcing our students to approach the shell as a kind of programming language. Most PowerShell books are into scripting by the third or fourth chapter, yet more and more PowerShell students were backing away from that programming-oriented approach. Those students wanted to use the shell as a shell, at least at first, and we simply werent delivering a learning experience that matched that desire.

So he decided to take a swing at it. A blog post on WindowsITPro.com proposed a table of contents for this book, and ample feedback from the blogs readers fine-tuned it into the book youre about to read. He wanted to keep each chapter short, focused, and easy to cover in a short period of timebecause we know administrators dont have a lot of free time, and often have to learn on the fly. When PowerShell v3 came out, it was obviously a good time to update the book, and Don turned to long-time collaborator Jeffery Hicks to help out.

We both wanted a book that would focus on PowerShell itself, and not on the myriad technologies that PowerShell touches, like Exchange Server, SQL Server, System Center, and so on. We truly feel that by learning to use the shell properly, you can teach yourself to administer all of those PowerShell-ed server products. So this book tries to focus on the core of using PowerShell. Even if youre also using a cookbook style of book, which provides ready-to-use answers for specific administrative tasks, this book will help you understand what those examples are doing. That understanding will make it easier to modify those examples for other purposes, and eventually to construct your own commands and scripts from scratch.

We hope this book wont be the only PowerShell education that you pursue. In fact, this books companion website, MoreLunches.com, is designed to help you continue that education in small chunks. It offers free videos that correspond to this books chapters, letting you see and hear our demonstrations of key techniques. Weve also co-authored Learn PowerShell Toolmaking in a Month of Lunches, which offers the same day-at-a-time approach to learning PowerShells scripting and tool-creation capabilities.

If you need any further help, we encourage you to log on to www.PowerShell.org. We both answer questions in several of the discussion forums there, and wed be happy to try and get you out of whatever youre stuck on. The site is also a great portal into the robust and active PowerShell communityyou can learn about the annual Scripting Games, the in-person PowerShell Summit, and about all of the regional and local user groups and PowerShell-related events that happen throughout the year. Get involvedits a great way to make PowerShell a more powerful part of your career.

Enjoyand good luck with the shell.

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 really shouldnt try to push through the whole book stick 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 actually 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 quite 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), as well as from the publishers website at www.manning.com/LearnWindowsPowerShell3inaMonthofLunchesSecondEdition.