Front matter
Sitting down to write this foreword, my first thought was, “Wow, there’s a lot to unpack here.” My own time with PowerShell started in 2005, about a year before the shell was unleashed at TechEd Barcelona 2006. Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, the progenitor of this book, was far from my first PowerShell tome. Jeff Hicks and I wrote three editions of Windows PowerShell: TFM with SAPIEN Technologies first. After those, I actually made a decision, if you can imagine it, to not write any more PowerShell books! But I quickly came to realize that the existing selection of PowerShell books—well over a dozen by then—was missing a major audience need. The books of the time were teaching PowerShell as a programming language, aiming for the fairly large audience of VBScript coders that existed at the time. But PowerShell itself was aiming for a far larger and broader audience: nonprogrammers.
That’s when I took the narratives I’d been using in live PowerShell classes and started constructing a new book: one that wouldn’t head directly to control-of-flow statements by chapter 3, and one that would really focus on a best-fit sequence of teaching to make learning PowerShell as easy as possible. I wanted to make, and keep, a promise: give me an hour a day for a month, and I’ll make you functionally useful in PowerShell.