Preface

I’ve been teaching and writing about Windows PowerShell for a long time. As I began contemplating this book, I realized that most PowerShell writers and teachers—including myself—were forcing our students to approach the shell as a kind of programming language. Most PowerShell books are into “scripting” by the third or fourth chapter, yet more and more PowerShell students were backing away from that programming-oriented approach. Those students wanted to use the shell as a shell, at least at first, and we simply weren’t delivering a learning experience that matched that desire.

So I decided to take a swing at it. A blog post on WindowsITPro.com proposed a table of contents for this book, and ample feedback from the blog’s readers fine-tuned it into the book you’re about to read. I wanted to keep each chapter short, focused, and easy to cover in a short period of time—because I know administrators don’t have a lot of free time, and often have to learn on the fly.