Windows Powershell in Action by Bruce Payette

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

PowerShell replaces cobbled-together assemblies of third-party management tools with an elegant programming language and a powerful scripting shell for the Windows environment. In the tradition of Manning's ground breaking "In Action" series, this book comes from right from the source. Written by Bruce Payette, one of principal creators of PowerShell, "Windows PowerShell in Action" shows you how to build scripts and utilities to automate system tasks or create powerful system management tools to handle the day-to-day tasks that drive a Windows administrator's life. Because it's based on the .NET platform, PowerShell is also a powerful tool for developers and power users.

"Windows PowerShell in Action" was written by Bruce Payette, one of the founding members of the Windows PowerShell team, co-designer of the PowerShell language and the principal author of the PowerShell language implementation. The book enables you to get the most out of the PowerShell environment. Using many examples, both small and large, this book illustrates the features of the language and environment and shows how to compose those features into solutions, quickly and effectively.

This book is designed for anyone who wants to learn PowerShell and use it well. Rather than simply being a book of recipes to read and apply, this book gives you the deep knowledge about how PowerShell works and how to apply it.

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents