Customer Reviews

Windows XP Under the Hood: Hardcore Windows Scripting and Command Line Power

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

 

 

This book is really useful if you want to script and are
(1) a developer (2) an administrator (3) a curious soul.
The title however can be misleading since "under the hood"
means that you will discover the hidden "architecture" of XP.
Nobody wants such an horrible thing, so the book is more intended to
say ( I guess):" how to be effective with the scripting capabilities
of Win XP and 2000".
The author not only gives the basics of the Windows Scripting
Host, but also some oldies like "batch commands" which can be pretty
useful when you work in a multi OS environment.
The style is clear and to the point: what I expect from a
developer. Go also for the errata on the author Web Site to correct
4 or 5 bugs and you will script on your XP system from chapter 2 ,
understanding some new possibilities of VB SCRIPT. You will realize also WHY Win 95 really
becomes obsolete and how to send mail with CDO technology.
For Active Directory addicts, you also have a chapter on ADSI.
I will say that this kind of book will have a great impact on
UNIX colleagues, always keen to criticize the "mouse" productivity
of Windows IT people. You can shell WinXP and this book shows you
great productivity tools that come with the Microsoft OS.
Good book indeed !

I read "Windows XP Under the Hood" (WXPUTH) because I wanted to know more about Windows scripting. I sought a modern book that covered Windows XP and its server counterpart (where possible), and went beyond the batch files of the 1990's. Ignoring some issues which can be addressed by an updated errata, WXPUTH will not disappoint. It's even useful to those running Windows 2000 and NT shops.

Let WXPUTH be your guide to a world where graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are optional! Author Brian Knittel introduces the reader to the full range of Windows' command-line capabilities. Through examples, tables, explanations, and humor, WXPUTH doesn't teach everything, but instead concentrates on the most useful features of the Windows command line.

If you've never done any scripting before, WXPUTH begins with a helpful tutorial on VBScript. Next are discussions of object-based scripting, which allow for greater flexibility and power than simple batch files. The Windows Script Host (WSH), Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), and Active Directory Scripting Interface (ADSI) provide deeper access to core Windows functions. WXPUTH even teaches how to create custom objects, which I found fascinating. (This is truly getting "under the hood," but in an accessible manner.)

Where necessary, WXPUTH reveals details of Windows' innards. Topics like X.500 and LDAP appear in ch. 8, while hidden tools like "iexpress" and how to start various control panel applets are discussed elsewhere. The author isn't afraid to point out where Microsoft documentation or implementation is confusing or broken, which shows he isn't a Redmond drone.

While the dozens of sample scripts in WXPUTH are very helpful, and offer great opportunities for customization, they sometimes seem confusing. I think some of them need adjustment to work properly, although tinkering with scripts is a learning method. The author also made a few questionable comments, such as not being able to use 'runas' to start "Windows Explorer or any of its derivative programs" (p. 560). I am logged into Windows XP as a user right now, and have one instance of Explorer running as a user and another running as "administrator," started with 'runas'. Perhaps better technical editing might have caught similar issues?

Regardless, WXPUTH is "the" book I will recommend as a resource for Windows scripting. The first time you send an email via the command line you'll begin to appreciate the gift Brian Knittel has given the Windows admin community!

1. I find the organization of the book fairly difficult to follow. It just doesn't flow for me (can't figure out why the topics are organized as they are). Clearly this is a personal preference thing - but the following books all felt more clearly organized to me:

Microsoft Windows 2000 Scripting Guide
Managing Enterprise Systems with the Windows Script Host
Windows 2000 Scripting Bible

2. There's a lot of text, but not that much concrete/applicable information. I like books that teach by doing - lots of short/sweet examples to illustrate the points. This book seems to have repurposed a great deal of MSDN documentation to describe the detail of functions and objects, but isn't really laid out as a reference. It feels like an unhappy marriage of reference book and how-to.

3. There are a number of frighteningly basic/obvious errors in the book - which pretty much ruin the credibility of the author. Just a few examples:

3a. COM is defined as Common Object Model (it's Component Object Model)
3b. CIM is defined as Common Interface Model (it's Common Information Model)
3c. Knittel says all CIMv2 objects start with Win32_ (clearly not the case)

4. There's very little on WMI (Knittel himself says "...this chapter gives the barest introduction to WMI".

5. Knittel's command-line section doesn't address WMIC at all, which is inarguably the MOST powerful command-line tool introduced in Windows XP.

It's not terrible or totally wrong, I just don't think it's as approachable, as deep, or as credible as the books mentioned above.

This book is perfect overview of VBScript and Scripting Windows XP. Author explains every aspect of Scripting without going into too much of details. Beginners will probably need additional info. But if you ask me nobody could do better job explaining of so many topics in one book. There are plenty examples you could use right away on the PC.
Thumbs up!!!

This is a nice book, but if you are a software developer or system administrator with a few years of experience, you probably already know at least 80% of the information presented, more if you are an experienced Python or Perl programmer. The chapters on WMI and ADSI are only 36 and 51 pages long (to give you an idea).

Again, it is a nice book, but it is not "hardcore", and the "user level" on the back cover should say "beginner-intermediate", not "intermediate-advanced".

Brian Knittel gets an A+ from me for being one of the most lucid technical writers I've ever read. I'm a social worker by day and a hobbyist at night who likes to tinker with the command-line. I have found the book easy to understand. Chapters are well laid out with ample reference sections. kudos!

This book opened my eyes as to the command line power that Windows actually has. Unix user may turn up their noses but even they have to admit WSH is pretty cool and smashes some of the traditional stereotypes about Windows only being for the technically challenged. The book does a good job of preparing you to start scripting in an MS environment.

I have found this book incredibly useful. Without it, I doubt I could have put together some sorely-needed processes such as a developer-friendly build for a large system with several VB6 components with complex interdependencies, communicating with .Net components via Interop, therefore regenerating wrappers on the fly. The options are controlled by an XML file that has quite a lot of backward references in it, necessitating recursion in the parsing, and VB script's regular expression support was handy as well. Unix people tend to be surprised at just how capable a non-object-oriented technology can be (well, there is support for objects in a limited way, but it's not like Java!)

Before I had this book I had never heard of WSC objects. What a nifty idea for the Windows environment: a source (script) code object, with methods and properties, that you can register and access like a DLL from your scripts. No compilation, no DLL hell.

Once you have the strong foundation in scripting principles that this book gives you, it is easy to add in topics that it doesn't cover. There's plenty of information on the Web about things like using ADO from VBscript, or HTA applications (a nice way to show a GUI display from a command-line script). Strongly recommended.

As a Windows author myself I tend to be very demanding when I look for books about the Windows operating system. I was overly pleased with both the book's content and presentation. This book never even found my bookshelf. It has a permanent home on my desk.

The perfect book for coming up to speed on Windows scripting.