Customer Reviews

Pro Windows PowerShell

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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!

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.

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.

Being a systems admin with a good working knowledge of Powershell, I decided to check out this book to get a better understanding of how Powershell works. I was not disappointed. Never having gotten an introduction to programming concepts this book proved helpful. Just doesn't give you the syntax for performing certain operations but tells you why. Overall a very good book, however, at points it does digress into tangents. Also would have liked some practical real world examples and recommendations on script constructions. I recommend it.

Pro Windows PowerShell gives a 'hands-on approach' to showing what PowerShell can do and how. The author also steps the reader through the scripts to show what the script is doing, why it is doing it and how the output can be used in the real world. Pro Windows PowerShell is more than a reference manual and is valuable for all levels of PowerShell users.