My Review of Windows PowerShell™ 2.0 Best Practices

Originally submitted at O'Reilly

Learn field-tested solutions, best practices, and proven techniques for Windows PowerShell 2.0—including expert tips and lessons learned from the insiders on the Windows PowerShell Team at Microsoft.

Windows PowerShell™ 2.0 Best Practices

First impressions

By jaype from Chicago IL on 2/9/2010

 

5out of 5

Pros: Easy to understand, Accurate, Well-written, Concise, Helpful examples

Best Uses: Expert, Intermediate

Describe Yourself: Developer, Sys Admin

I'm just beginning to read this book and I thought I'd add my first impressions. I'm a SQL Server DBA and I'm looking to learn Powershell as a means of remotely administering my servers. I've only used Powershell briefly so I'm far from an expert. I'm hopeful this book will help my understanding.

First off, this book is not a book for beginners. A background in Powershell is helpful. I'm having to look up some of the concepts. But that's not the fault of the book, and the authors say as much in the Introduction. My only suggestion for other Powershell beginners is to read Chapter 6, on configuring the environment, first.

I've finished the first two chapters so far and I find the book is well written and informative. Chapter 1 is about Version 2, what's new, and how to deploy it on different OS's. It also shows how to use a version tag for backwards compatibility with version 1. Chapter 2 shows how to use WMI functionality and how remoting works. Remoting is also new to Version 2.

There's 2 things that make this book invaluable as a reference. First, the appendices are full of great information. For example, Appendix A lists all the cmdlets in Version 2 with a short description. Second, on the companion CD, there's a Quick Reference Guide pdf file that summarizes the points of each chapter.

I'll update my review after I finish the book.

(legalese)