Pro Windows PowerShell [Paperback]

Hristo Deshev (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590599403 | ISBN-13: 978-1590599402 | Publication Date: February 25, 2008 | Edition: 1

Our goal is to show how PowerShell can help script most of those tasks and reduce their burden. The book contains examples on automating typical system administration tasks: configuration, monitoring, network queries, text manipulation, and file operations. The ideas presented will be beneficial to power users needing a better shell and an automation environment, system and network administrators looking to streamline their daily activities, and software developers wishing to optimize their build and deploy process.

We will jump right in and get results fast. The most important feature of the book is that it will show everything using many, specific examples that provide real value to the user. It will show "the big picture": interoperability with the outside world. Users will see examples dealing with other programs, the OS, and the network. Plus, It will introduce free and open-source tools and extensions that help us get results fast. (We are unique here – none of the competitors does that.) Powershell has proven to be a very popular area and this book has the contents and the technical expertise within to be a success.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Hristo Deshev is a group product manager for telerik, a leading vendor of ASP.NET controls (http://www.telerik.com). He has been working on component development for the past several years, focusing on creating rich, highly interactive AJAX solutions. A major goal of his and his team’s is "taming web development" – applying agile software engineering practices to create robust solutions targeting all modern web browsers and supporting multiple ASP.NET and Visual Studio.NET versions. You can reach Hristo via email at hristo.deshev at telerik.com and on his blog at http://blogs.telerik.com/blogs/twisted_asp_net/.

Product Details

• Paperback: 520 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (February 25, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590599403
• ISBN-13: 978-1590599402
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #489,364 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars You Can Teach an Old CMD Prompt New Tricks!, March 28, 2008

By 

Robert L. Stinnett (Boonville, MO) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pro Windows PowerShell (Paperback)

I've been using the command prompt (DOS for your old schoolers) since the days of MS-DOS 2.11. I thought I had done about everything a person could possibly do with the limited scripting abilities of the command prompt -- and then I happened across this book and it was like going back to school.

Windows Powershell is essentially object-oriented programming mashing up with the command line, with some extras thrown in. In this book the author shows you all the new tricks of the trade and will have you looking at ways to automate your Windows tasks in ways you never thought possible.

There are many things that we want to do on our Windows servers or XP/Vista boxes that you have to "hack" or find a third-party utility to do. With Windows Powershell a lot of those tasks can now be brought back "in house" without the need for hacks and kludges.

The nice thing about this book is that it not only talks about Powershell, it also walks you through real-life examples. It's written in many ways like an introductory programming language book would be -- but at the same time the author remembers that most readers will be IT System Admins and not programmers, so he doesn't bury the reader in programming talk to the point they are lost.

If you work in IT and deal with Windows servers you owe it to yourself to check out Windows Powershell and this book. You will find that under the hood of that Windows box is a supercharged '78 Trans-Am just waiting for you to put the pedal to the metal and experience the power!

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb explanation of a marginal product, January 4, 2009

By 

Application Software Developer (Brookline, MA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pro Windows PowerShell (Paperback)

Having corresponded with Mr. Deshev while pushing the envelope with Telerik Web Forms controls, I looked forward to his description of Powershell and was not disappointed. It exceptionally thorough and readable. For my purposes the COM interface, described in Chapter 19, provides the most significant advance over the Windows command language. Mr. Deshev makes this sometimes involuted topic transparent.

This book was my introduction to Powershell. Having heard from other software developers about its usefulness I was disappointed, not in Mr. Deshev's work, but in the tool. Powershell fails to automate the most significant parts of the Windows environment for a scripting language, the configuration tools of Control Panel. The functions of some of those tools can be accessed by knowledge of their configuration files, such as the IIS XML metabase, but knowledge about particulars must be developed piecemeal, and most of the tools lack such a configuration file. Perhaps Powershell is a work in progress, but far more progress along those lines will be needed before it becomes an especially useful product.

5.0 out of 5 stars Rodney Dodge, October 30, 2011

By 

Rodney Dodge - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pro Windows PowerShell (Paperback)

Book showed up on time in great condition for a great price. The book itself was very useful - used the heck out of it for a general explanation / overview of PowerShell. I would definitely use this supplier again.