For those fans of PowerShell, and for those just getting on-board, PowerShell MVP Doug Finke has built the bridge for your journey with his latest book Windows PowerShell for Developers from O’Reilly Media.
As a long time user of PowerShell for everything from quick scripts to more challenging workflows and processes, this book has really upped my game. Doug’s conversational and well-worded writing style help to bring you through the process of firming up, and advancing your skills with the PowerShell environment.
The book covers the exciting new features of PowerShell 3.0, while also adding to the foundation of PowerShell scripting that is available today so don’t be afraid to jump right in even if you haven’t had any exposure to 3.0 yet.
While having development experience will help, I found that it was not necessary. The well crafted instructional style guides you through how to extend the already great capabilities of PowerShell with .NET tools and a number of other widely available standards and tools such as XML, JSON, web services and Microsoft Excel. Even as more of a scripter than a developer it was well within my level of understanding.
Along with the chapters come great example code which you can download, test, tweak and even reuse which was very helpful with the more advanced concepts that are touched on in the book. I found that I was able to read the book from cover to cover, and then revisit to dig into the specific topics and dive deeper into the great examples and map them against some real use cases that I wanted to try.
There are also lots of great references within the chapters to external resources. The explanation of the history of PowerShell and other web concepts within help to either add to, or reinforce your knowledge. Whether you are new to PowerShell, are transitioning from other scripting languages, or have been with PowerShell since the beginning, you will get value from this book.
With the release of Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 around the corner, the game is changing and this will get you on the road to great automation, workflow, data management and building exciting scripts and tools to leverage the over 2300 CmdLets that will become available in those environments.
I highly recommend that you get on over to O’Reilly, so click here to get the book and I hope that you will enjoy it and gain as much value from it as I have.
Thanks to Doug and to the great folks at O’Reilly Media! And to quote Doug: “If you repeat it, PowerShell it.”
