About this Book

published book

This book is for anyone with an interest in PowerShell. Perhaps you want to learn what you can accomplish or perhaps you’re trying to solve a problem and you see a chapter that will help. While the majority of the chapters in the book are written for IT pros, there is plenty of content for developers and others whose PowerShell experience may be more peripheral.

We’re assuming you have some fundamental PowerShell knowledge. If you’re an absolute beginner, much of the content will be lost on you. This book isn’t intended as a tutorial for learning PowerShell, but it should teach you how to accomplish certain tasks or take advantage of a PowerShell feature that goes beyond the core documentation.

In any event, this is PowerShell content you likely won’t find any place else, written by PowerShell experts and MVPs.

What version of PowerShell do I need?

This book isn’t targeted at any particular version of PowerShell. There are some chapters that are PowerShell 3.0-specific and that should be evident from reading the chapter. The safest assumption is that you’re using at least PowerShell 2.0.

Where’s coverage of Microsoft Exchange?

As we were assembling content for this book, we had to use what contributors wanted to write about, but we also wanted to keep the book broad in scope. Yes, there are a few chapters that are SQL Server-related, but many of the concepts and techniques can apply to other PowerShell situations.

Frankly, products like Microsoft Exchange, which rely heavily on PowerShell, deserve their own Deep Dives book, and we hope someone from the Exchange community will step up and lead the effort for a similar book, hopefully with some good PowerShell content. The same is true of other Microsoft products such as SharePoint and Active Directory.

How the book is organized

This book is divided into 4 parts, each centered on a PowerShell theme:

Part 1—PowerShell administration
Part 2—PowerShell scripting
Part 3—PowerShell for developers
Part 4—PowerShell platforms

This isn’t necessarily a hard and fast division. Some chapters could easily have been assigned to multiple parts. Since the book isn’t intended as a tutorial, you can jump from chapter to chapter as you see fit. An effort was made within each section to order content in such a way as to facilitate learning.

Code conventions and downloads

All source code in listings or in text is in a fixed-width font like this to separate it from ordinary text. We’ve tried to make any code that’s shown as a listing available as a download. You should test and review all code samples in a non-production environment. None of the code listings should be considered production-ready.

Throughout the book you will see shorter code examples. Many of these are one-line expressions. Due to printing limitations we have had to take a few liberties with how code is presented. You might see a command presented like this:

PS C:\> Get-service | where {$_.status –eq 'running'} | select
   status,displayname

or like this

Get-service |
where {$_.status –eq 'running'} |
select status,displayname

It is the same one-line command. We are trusting that you have enough fundamental PowerShell knowledge to understand what a basic command looks like and how to use it either in the shell or a script.

The source code for the examples in this book is available online from the publisher’s website at www.manning.com/PowerShellDeepDives.

Author Online

The purchase of PowerShell Deep Dives includes free access to a private web forum run by Manning Publications, where you can make comments about the book, ask technical questions, and receive help from the authors and from other users. To access the forum and subscribe to it, point your web browser to www.manning.com/PowerShellDeepDives. The Author Online forum and the archives of previous discussions will be accessible from the publisher’s website as long as the book is in print.

This is the place to go to report errors in the book or to receive help with title-specific content. If you’re looking for more general help with PowerShell, please visit the forum at http://PowerShell.org. Registration is free and many authors of this book are active on the site.

About the editors

Jeffery Hicks is the lead editor for PowerShell Deep Dives. The bios and photographs of the section editors can be found at the end of the introductions for their respective sections.

Part 1—PowerShell administration, edited by Richard Siddaway
Part 2—PowerShell scripting, edited by Jeff Hicks
Part 3—PowerShell for developers, edited by Oisín Grehan
Part 4—PowerShell platforms, edited by Aleksandar Nikolić

Jeffery Hicks is a Microsoft MVP in Windows PowerShell, a Microsoft Certified Trainer, and an IT veteran with over 20 years of experience, much of it spent as an IT consultant specializing in Microsoft server technologies with an emphasis in automation and efficiency. He works today as an independent author, trainer, and consultant. Jeff writes the popular Prof. PowerShell column for MPCMag.com, and is a regular contributor to the Petri IT Knowledgebase, 4SysOps and the Altaro Hyper-V blog, as well as a frequent speaker at technology conferences and user groups.

Jeff’s latest books are Manning’s Learn PowerShell 3 in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition and Learn PowerShell Toolmaking in a Month of Lunches, both with Don Jones, and PowerShell in Depth: An Administrator’s Guide, coauthored with Don Jones and Richard Siddaway.