Book Image

PowerShell: Automating Administrative Tasks

By : Michael Shepard, Chendrayan Venkatesan, Sherif Talaat, Brenton J.W. Blawat
Book Image

PowerShell: Automating Administrative Tasks

By: Michael Shepard, Chendrayan Venkatesan, Sherif Talaat, Brenton J.W. Blawat

Overview of this book

Are you tired of managing Windows administrative tasks manually and are looking to automate the entire process? If yes, then this is the right course for you. This learning path starts your PowerShell journey and will help you automate the administration of the Windows operating system and applications that run on Windows. It will get you up and running with PowerShell, taking you from the basics of installation to writing scripts and performing web server automation. You will explore the PowerShell environment and discover how to use cmdlets, functions, and scripts to automate Windows systems. The next installment of the course focuses on gaining concrete knowledge of Windows PowerShell scripting to perform professional-level scripting. The techniques here are packed with PowerShell scripts and sample C# code to automate tasks. You will use .NET classes in PowerShell and C# to manage Exchange Online. In the final section, you will delve into real-world examples to learn how to simplify the management of your Windows environment. You will get to grips with PowerShell’s advanced functions and how to most effectively administer your system. This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products: [*] Getting Started with PowerShell by Michael Shepard [*] Windows PowerShell for .Net Developers Second Edition by Chendrayan Venkatesan and Sherif Talaat [*] Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting by Brenton J.W. Blawat
Table of Contents (6 chapters)

Chapter 5. Exploring Application Programming Interface

Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of protocols, routines, and tools used to build software applications. The main purpose of API is data exchange and integration, whereas Software Development Kit (SDK) is customization. The type of API varies based on the data exchange and transport mechanism. The transport mechanism may be web-based, source code, or binary function.

Following are the most common types of API:

  • Web Services API
    • This is an API that is highly useful in up and coming technologies. It is hypertext-based and the standards used are REST, SOAP, XML-RPC, and JSON-RPC.
    • It is commonly used in web applications and service-oriented architecture (SOA).
  • Source code API
    • This offers libraries of objects, classes, and so on
    • It is commonly used in development projects
    • The standards used vary based on the platform, such as .NET or J2EE

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Exploring API using PowerShell
  • The...