Customer Reviews

Professional Windows PowerShell (Programmer to Programmer)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is extremely well written and easy to understand coming from a non or limited programming background. If you are completely new to programming, I'd suggest reading Microsoft Windows PowerShell Programming for the Absolute Beginner by Jerry Lee Ford Jr. first and then read this book. Also, so far the code has been exceptionally accurate, which makes the experience that much better.

This is a really good book. I have purchased a bunch of other books on Powershell but most of them were written with developers in mind and not system administrators. Well good news, this book is written specifically for Windows System Admins. It walks you through how the scripting language works (.NET), and it provides very clear examples of how to use and create power shell scripts. With this book in hand and the free information that is available on the Microsoft Technet site, you are on you way to becoming a proficient Power Shell Scripter! Well done Mr. Andrew Watt.

Great book, judging by reaction of Exchange admin who grabbed it and I have not seen it far from his hands yet. When I ask, he just smiles and says that he will give it back "some day".

Books in "Professional" series are expected to be if not the ultimate word on the subject then at least very complete, thorough, practical and usefull to people who have to deal with the subject matter for a living.

In actual professional work a person doesn't encounter PowerShell as a new toy to play with "just because" but as a new and unknown thing for which he either has to write scripts from scratch or deal with someone else's scripts. Actual professional also has several cmd line interpreters and scripting languages under his belt - at the very least Microsoft's own cmd.exe or one of Unix shells.

What this book does is to treat a reader as a newbie who can barely click a mouse. Even such reader would get sick after all blurb at the beginning - takes 47 pages to stumble upon simple "dir".

Actual scripting is barely touched, glanced over, and some very fundamental elements are not even mentioned. In particular there's nothing on declaring, parsing and processing script params, not to mention forwarding script params to another script. Need to write a cmdlet ? Sorry, this one talks only how to use some of them and on the level which is kind of on par with just typing [help dir].

It's too bad one can't give a book like this 0 or negative stars, just for the time wasted trying to find some at least semi usable practical info in it. Terrible, terrible waste of time.

The book was reviewed and used for a Suncoast Security Society presentation found [...]. While reviewing the book we found it well organized and thought out in a logical progression. Where we found it lacking was the examples were a little too simple and we felt the title containing "Professional .." wasn't consistant with the content and "Introduction .." would have been more appropriate.

As an example in Chapter 13 the COM automation of Excel only showed how to open Excel from powershell. In our presentation we connected to an Active Directory domain, pulled a list of users. Then used the powershell looping mechanism to iterate through the list and push it to Excel. That put the power of powershell in prespective and made a much more effective example.

In conclusion, this book is a great primer for getting you started. However, if you are expirenced in scripting with vbscript you will find yourself wanting a little more to connect the dots and create advanced scripts.

I purchased this book based on two previous reviews and so far I'm somewhat disappointed. For example, I think the author should include how to add comments to a script (e.g. #) early on in the book because adding comments is proper coding practice. Also, none of the author's sample scripts include comments either. Additionally, I find the sample scripts to be very simplistic short examples and I defiantly expected to see far more complex sample scripts that demonstrates the more advanced scripting capabilities of the PowerShell scripting language. Based on this, I'm surprised that this book is in the professional series because what is presented in the book is at an introductory level.

My expectations from a book like this are to understand how Powershell works and how to solve problems with Powershell. This book doesn't do well in any of those areas, expecially the last one. I never found a solution by the index and also reading the section, I never found the answer to my question. Just as an example, the error handling section is useless. Unfortunately I don't did not find yet a good alternative.