Customer Reviews

Windows PowerShell 2.0 Best Practices (Best Practices (Microsoft))

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Windows Powershell is still a relatively new language although more and more system administrators are now looking into it. Previously administrators either had the choice of VBScript or straight command line batch files/scripts which were either fairly limiting in what they could do or were fairly complex in how to actually do things. Powershell now gives administrators the power and flexibility of the .net framework as well as being quite easy to write extremely powerful scripts. With the power and flexibility that Powershell gives administrators comes a responsibility however.

Windows PowerShell 2.0 Best Practices assumes that you already have an understanding of Powershell, it's not a book on learning Powershell. The introductory chapters however do give you a brief overview of what you need to run Powershell in your environment and goes through the installation and configuration process before delving into some of the powerful capabilities that Powershell allows administrators including how to access and use various native Win32 COM objects like the Win32_Process classes.

Any administrator will sooner or later need to work with ADSI, the active directory service Interfaces and therefore a chapter has been dedicated to dealing with ADSI through Powershell, from creating users and groups to creating computer accounts and exporting statistics on your active directory environment to spreadsheets for reporting.

The book is divided into 5 main sections. The main sections are an introduction to Powershell, Planning, Designing, Testing and Deploying and finally Optimizing your cmdlets and scripts. Each section is split into chapters detailing specific parts of the overall section theme, for example under Planning there are chapters on identifying scripting opportunities, configuring your scripting environment, avoiding scripting pitfalls etc. Although this is a best practices book, there are numerous examples within each chapter showing how to best take advantage of Powershell 2 and numerous sidebars giving additional information, anecdotes or highlighting particularly important areas.

The appendixes in the book are crammed full of information from listing out all the included cmdlets that ship with Powershell 2 and a brief description of each to listing important and useful classes that you may need to work with from the .Net Framework, COM objects and WMI objects.

Weighing in at a tad over 700 pages, this is a hefty tomb chock full of useful advice, tips and tricks and information to let you take full advantage of Powershell 2. Although aimed mainly at system administrators, developers will find a lot of useful information contained within these pages and can start writing scripts to help automate some of their daily activities. Sometimes the writing can feel a little disjointed however this does not detract from an overall excellent book.

I purchased this book to learn more about Powershell 2.0 and was very impressed. This book covers some of the basics and really offers a great model for creating Powershell scripts. I'm new to Powershell and I found this book to be very easy to grasp and had many examples to learn from. Excellent Book for anyone wanting to get serious and learn Powershell.

Just when I thought I was getting better @ Powershell, this book has much more to offer and keeps
me in line w/ better scripting practices. Examples are top notch and explanations couldn't be
simpler.

Ed Wilson IS the scripting guy for crying out loud. i recommend this book and also check out the Microsoft scripting site for tips and information, the forums are awesome.

The book is a helpful resource, i'd recommend it.