Customer Reviews

Windows Powershell Cookbook: for Windows, Exchange 2007, and MOM V3

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Windows PowerShell Cookbook: for Windows, Exchange 2007, and MOM V3

I bought this book for two reasons. 1) to get up to speed on powershell and various use cases. 2) to get up to speed on powershell with respect to Exchange specific tasks and MOM specific tasks.

With respect to #1, it is an adequate book and I would give it 4 stars. With respect to #2, it is a dismal failure and I would be generous by giving it two stars. There are roughly 5 pages on both Exchange and MOM. You are better off using the help files or online docs.

Summary statement: This is a good generic powershell book but is poor in its attempt to provide an adequate resource for the Exchange 2007 and MOM sections.

This PowerShell book is one of three that I own. As with most other O'reilly cookbooks, I recommend PowerShell Cookbook as not a beginner's guide (for that I recommend Wrox's Professional PowerShell) but as a reference for those who are somewhat familiar with the language and looking for solutions to everyday and not-so-everyday tasks. Even so, I did use this book to learn PowerShell so if you have the budget for only one book, I'd suggest buying this one. If you have the budget for two, also go for Wrox's Professional PowerShell. If you have the budget for three, add Bruce Payette's incredible "PowerShell in Action" to your collection to learn not only how but why.

Windows PowerShell Cookbook makes it apparent that the author, Lee Holmes, is an accomplished and articulate coder as his solutions are often quite elegant. Because of this, I would also recommend this book for those looking to sharpen their scripting style.

As with much 1.0 software, PowerShell is missing a few things -- most notably deep Active Directory integration. I look forward to PowerShell 2.0 and with it, the second edition of this book.

I've never read this book. It is after all a "cookbook".

What I can say is that many times I've turned to this book when I needed some clue to solve a practical problem. Somehow I've always found what I needed. I just browse the table of contents for a likely section, go there, and find something that looks like what I'm trying to do.

Contrast this with Bruce Payette's Windows PowerShell in Action. That's a great book to read through and get an in-depth understanding of PowerShell. It is horrible for finding practical answers.

Note that I'm a software engineer and not an administrator. I have no idea how sections on Exchange and MOM are.

Recommended.

The PowerShell Cookbook is an easy read, and gives a great example-based overview of how you can best use the language to get stuff done. I would actually recommend it as a first book on PowerShell for people who like to learn by DOING. Just going through the first several chapters, you'll get a great feel for the language and how to best use it.

The descriptions are clear and entertaining enough to keep you engaged throughout. I would even recommend this book to a complete scripting newbie who is interested in getting their feet wet. PowerShell is a great first scripting language, and again...learning by doing is the best way to make things stick. If you want to learn all about the language, Bruce Payette's "PowerShell in Action" is also an excellent read.

While the earlier review's critique of cmdlet coverage ('read the SDK') is valid, this book (and Lee Holmes' "Precision Computing" blog) will give you many practical ideas and give you a real taste of the kind of cooking you can do with the new language and environment. Bon Appetite.

The book presents many real world examples in a cookbook type format in addition to the normal background and code structure and reference guide. Good introduction to what wants to be the next generation scripting language for Windows 7 and on.

I'm a SQL Server Developer with the occasional DBA need. Powershell can do some amazing things for my responsibilities and this book did not disappoint. It explains the scripts very well and the examples are great. I keep in handy on my desk.

This book is great for the beginner. Not only does this book explain how to code in powershell, it does it using examples that can be used, right out of the box. It covers topics at the OS level, such as file copying, deleting a file, or even edit a file, through Exchange specific scripts and even manipulating registry settings. It makes learning powershell easy and makes you productive while learning.

A very practical, task-oriented book! Not exactly for a beginner, who's trying to learn PowerShell. This book is filled with examples and solutions for everyday use. Excellent source for developers and seasoned Windows administrators.

With 'Windows PowerShell Cookbook: for Windows, Exchange 2007, and MOM V3' learn how the old way of writing scripts for Windows is in the past and it's better that way!

PowerShell (released in 2006) is quite simply a new way of shell scripting for Windows that takes the old command way of doing things and injecting it with super steroids. By leveraging the power of .NET and giving the user a good way to use it via the command line, PowerShell is the end result. Everything that administrators or power users ever did before or wanted to do in Windows can now be done faster and better than before and this is the perfect guide to help you do the things that you never thought were possible before.

Chapter Overview

01. Intro to Windows PowerShell
02. Pipelines
03. Variables and Objects
04. Looping and Flow Control
05. Strings and Unstructured Text
06. Calculations and Math
07. Simple Files
08. Structured Files
09. Internet-Enabled Scripts
10. Code Reuse
11. Lists, Arrays, Hashtables
12. User Interaction
13. Tracing and Error Management
14. Environmental Awareness
15. Extending Windows PowerShell
16. Security and Script Signing
17. Files and Directories
18. Windows Registry
19. Comparing Data
20. Event Logs
21. Processes
22. System Services
23. Active Directory
24. Enterprise Computer Management
25. Manage and Exchange 2007 Server
26. Manage an Operations Manager 2007 Server
A. PowerShell Language and Environment
B. Regular Expression Reference
C. PowerShell Automatic Variables
D. Standard PowerShell Verbs
E. Selected .NET Classes and Their Uses
F. WMI Reference
G. Selected COM Objects and Their Uses
H. .NET String Formatting
I. .NET DateTime Formatting

With around 270 recipes, this is a full reference. If you use PowerShell or are and admin that needs to learn it you would be wise to pick this book up and start using it, it's a great resource to have by your side.

***** RECOMMENDED

I have been a huge fan of the Cookbook series of books. The Cookbooks are set up in the Problem/Solution/Discussion format, where the author proposes a common problem, shows a code/configuration solution to that problem, and then discusses why/how this solves the problem.

The Cookbook series has covered many technical topics and, in my opinion, covered the topics quite well. My current favorite is the IOS Cookbook(Cisco IOS Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))), which set the bar quite high for the level of content for this series.

When I heard that there was going to be a Cookbook focused on PowerShell, I eagerly watched for it to appear on the bookshelf at my local bookstore (and to be available online). My first impression was that, for an O'Reilly Cookbook, it was rather skinny (584 pages). Being skinny does not doom a book to being a poor resource, so I picked it up and began to read.

In scanning the table of contents, it appeared that the book covered a wide array of common, not-so-common, and quite interesting tasks. After five minutes of reviewing the enclosed scripts and instructions, I was extremely disappointed. While the problems covered a good amount of ground and the scripts to solve the problems were elegant (better than anything I could come up with), the discussion was lacking.

In the IOS Cookbook, one could gain a working understanding of many of the protocols, services, and features offered in Cisco devices through the discussion portion of the solutions. I did not see that same ability reflected in the Windows PowerShell Cookbook.

The most disappointing to me was the coverage of how to create a PowerShell Cmdlet and how to add PowerShell scripting to your own programs. While Mr. Holmes provides examples of how to do each of the tasks, the discussion could be summed up as "check out the SDK documentation". The book would have been better if he had not broached these topics.

The Windows PowerShell Cookbook will stay on my shelf as a reference book (for the code samples), but I would look to other resources first (e.g. Windows PowerShell in Action), if you need a resource to help learn PowerShell.