Preface

These are the last words that I am writing and perhaps the first words you will be reading. For me the journey is coming to an end, and for you the adventure just begins as you dive deeper into the world of PowerShell. Welcome!

There are a significant number of PowerShell books already, so why do we need another one? I wanted to produce a book that showed how to use PowerShell to solve the sorts of problems administrators face every day. PowerShell is a tool for automating the administration of your Windows-based systems, but there wasn’t a book available that described how to use it to solve my problems. Now there is.

I’ve written this for system administrators who want to automate their administration tasks. The PowerShell language is covered in sufficient detail to explain everything you see in the book, but we’re concentrating on providing solutions to the types of problems we continually face administering Windows, Exchange, Active Directory, and IIS, among others.

We’ll look at how to automate our system administration, and equally importantly, we’ll look at why we’re doing these things. The book supplies a large suite of scripts that can be put to work in your environment immediately. Linked to the scripts is the background to the task we’re solving, so you can put the script into the context of your needs. More than a cookbook or a description of the PowerShell language, this is your guide to automation through PowerShell.