Preface

Well, it’s been a wild ride since the first edition of this book was released. At that time, PowerShell had just shipped and had a fairly limited scope of influence. Things have changed a lot. PowerShell now ships in the box with Windows (at least Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2). The number of PowerShell users is now in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions (this is not a formal estimate—I just looked at some of the download counters for PowerShell-related tools and went from there).

One of the biggest events from my perspective was the release of PowerShell version 2 in July of 2009. Obviously it was time for a sequel to the book. I put together a short proposal and estimate of the amount of work needed to update the book. The initial estimate was for a few months of work—a couple of new chapters, a few updates here and there, and we’re good to go. Wow, was I ever wrong about that! PowerShell v2 was a really big release.