Customer Reviews

Managing Enterprise Systems with the Windows Script Host

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4 star:		(1)
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There are so many book on the market for the Windows Script Host (WSH) that making a decision on which one is right for your own environment can be very difficult.

What this book is: This is a recipe book for network administrators who have at least a solid beginners experience with the WSH and writing scripts in the XML and VBScript format. This book is full of completed scripts, with each script containing a flow from problem identification and script answer to run-time expectations and script component flow discussion. The book is logically organized into easy to find sections, with a useful table of contents.

What this book is not: This is not a reference guide for the VBScript language. This is not an ideal reference guide for script developers. This is not a learners guide for the WSH; there is no overview of the language or of the scripting object elements. This is not a guide for those only familiar with JScript.

The book gives excellent VBScript script solutions utilizing the native WSH objects (WScript.*, FSO), WMI and ADSI and can complement any administrators toolkit. The reading can be a bit dry, but as the book is not really designed to be read cover to cover, it is not an issue. The author is part of the Microsoft Scripting Technologies Team, and the writing style of the book reads very much like most Microsoft documentation, so be prepared to re-read a few things here and there. The author discusses many of the Microsoft scripting tools available from their web site, so be sure to visit Microsoft to download these before reading about them as the author does not introduce a source of the utilities prior to discussing them and assumes you already have them installed. My only other minor issue with the book is that no CD-ROM was included; you need to visit the publisher's web site and download the code from there.

All in all, this is a very handy title and a recommended addition to the toolkit style of books on the WSH.

While this book, at first glance may seem like a box of nuts and bolts, the author does a wonderful job of showing you what the heck Windows Script Host can do using almost all of the facilities of Windows.
It tends to look like a coder's paradise but it turns out much of this stuff is really very useful in preparing a medium size enterprise for tools to achieve very very low server and application administration.
I am starting to re-read for the 3rd time - I am only now starting to get the depth this work is capable of taking me to...

The best all round coverage of advanced WSH topics. This book provides a huge range
of information, including ADSI, CDO, WMI, FSO, registry, security, office automation, regular expressions.

Lots of recent topics and techologies not found in some of the older books (I have most of them), such as WSH 5.6, WMI and
ADSI information on IIS5 and Exchange 2000. Also covers topics such as regular expressions (very interesting).

While the topics are covered in 'cookbook' format, there is plenty of discussion on the different topics presented, plenty of lists
of properties and methods for various objects.

Another nice thing is all major tasks are performed using internal Windows objects instead of the Visual Basic
COM object approach some other books take, so no additional objects to register or distribute.

Don't buy this book if you want to learn how to program in VBScript or a general VBScript reference, get Tim Hill's
WSH book for that.

Excellent solution references in WSH, the author use many HELPFULL examples to illustrate the usage. Although it is not an introduction book, it is really useful