front matter
While most people know PowerShell as a command-line tool, it is truly much more than that. If you look at Microsoft’s description of PowerShell, it says that it is an automation and configuration tool/framework. PowerShell was written to be a plain text language that is easy to pick up and get started with but also a very powerful tool that you can use to automate an untold number of tasks in your environment and daily life.
However, I’m not here to sell you on PowerShell. The fact that you are reading this book shows you know what PowerShell is capable of. Instead, this book is designed to help you learn from my over-a-decade’s worth of experiences in creating PowerShell-based automations and apply those lessons to your own automation needs.
Like many people in the information technology space, I started my career on the help desk and moved into a systems administrator role. No matter what position I was in, if there was a repetitive task I needed to do, I scripted it—first in VBS and then eventually in PowerShell. I was in a unique position because my background was in infrastructure, but I ultimately landed at a company that does custom application development. I learned many skills from those I worked with along the way who helped me build bigger and better automations.