From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble Review
1+1=2. The Earth is round. The Windows command line stinks. It's time to revisit one of your deepest assumptions about life. If you have the courage, read Windows PowerShell In Action.
Author Bruce Payette co-architected the PowerShell language and developed its core implementation, so you won't find a more knowledgeable author. Payette starts by outlining Microsoft's goals for PowerShell, explaining the approach it chose (and why it avoided other alternatives) and previewing some of PowerShell's major advantages (such as its support for the .NET object model).
Next, you'll walk through installing PowerShell (it doesn't ship with Vista, XP, or Server 2003 yet, but it'll run with all of them). You'll get comfortable with PowerShell's basic techniques and shortcuts and review some short scripts -- for evaluating basic expressions, processing data, and so forth. Payette illuminates important concepts such as "elastic syntax," pipelines, and "cmdlets" and explains PowerShell's complex parsing rules. Then, step by step, he covers virtually the entire language: types and their advantages; operators and variables, ScriptBlocks, errors, exceptions, debugging, and more.
In the final four chapters, you'll put PowerShell to work and gain a deeper understanding of its power. You'll walk through several processing examples utilizing text, files, and XML; learn how to create a WinForms application with PowerShell (and why you might want to); and use PowerShell to control existing COM and WMI objects.
Last but not least, it's been said that "you can't throw a dead cat without hitting a security feature" in PowerShell. In "lucky" Chapter 13, Payette introduces those security features and shows exactly how to take advantage of them. Bill Camarda, from the February 2007 Read Only
From the Publisher
“There's no better way to learn PowerShell than from someone on the core PowerShell team - and that's exactly what you get with this book.”
—Joe Topjian, adminspotting.net
Windows PowerShell (code named Monad) is here! Microsoft's next generation command line scripting solution
combines the interactivity of KSH or BASH, the programmability of Perl or
Ruby, and the production-orientation of AS400 CL or VMS DCL. Because it's
based on .NET, you can do things in a shell environment that previously you
could only do in VB, C#, or VBScript. Author Bruce Payette is one of the
Windows PowerShell language architects and developed the core language implementation. In Windows PowerShell in Action, he covers basic batch style scripting
and string processing through COM, WMI and finally .NET and WinForms
programming. Because Windows PowerShell is also the foundation for Microsoft's next
generation of Admin GUIs, you can do everything from the GUI that you can do
from the command line. You'll never view command line scripting the same way
again.
About the Author
Bruce Payette is a founding member of the Windows PowerShell team, the author of the
Windows PowerShell language interpreter, and a key designer of the Windows PowerShell language.
Bruce has been working on UNIX shell and utility tools for Windows for the
past 15 years at companies like MKS and Softway, now part of Microsoft
Services for Unix. Bruce holds a BASc from the University of Waterloo.
loading...