Book Image

Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting - Third Edition

By : Chris Dent
Book Image

Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting - Third Edition

By: Chris Dent

Overview of this book

PowerShell scripts offer a handy way to automate various chores, however working effectively with these scripts can be a difficult task. This comprehensive guide starts with the fundamentals before moving on to advanced-level topics to help you become a PowerShell Core 6.0 expert. The first module, PowerShell Core 6.0 Fundamentals, begins with the new features of PowerShell Core 6.0, installing it on Linux, and working with parameters, objects and .NET classes from within PowerShell Core 6.0. As you make your way through the chapters, you'll see how to efficiently manage large amounts of data and interact with other services using PowerShell Core 6.0. You'll be able to make the most of PowerShell Core 6.0's powerful automation feature, where you will have different methods available to parse data and manipulate regular expressions and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). After having explored automation, you will enter the extending PowerShell Core 6.0 module, covering asynchronous processing and desired state configuration. In the last module, you will learn to extend PowerShell Core 6.0 using advanced scripts and filters, and also debug issues along with working on error handling techniques. By the end of this book, you will be an expert in scripting with PowerShell Core 6.0.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Exploring PowerShell Fundamentals
6
Section 2: Working with Data
16
Section 3: Automating with PowerShell
19
Section 4: Extending PowerShell

Preface

Windows PowerShell is an established language. Over the years, it has become increasingly important to Microsoft Windows-based services, and of course, cloud services such as Azure.

PowerShell Core represents a significant step forward; PowerShell Core expands out to Linux and macOS, opening up more opportunities to use the language.

The move to open source with PowerShell Core has opened the floodgates for new features, tweaks, and fixes. This is clearly where the future of PowerShell lies. Fortunately, the lessons learned using Windows PowerShell are transferable.

PowerShell Core is great but, perhaps, not quite ready to completely replace Windows PowerShell. Module developers need to test, update, and in some cases rewrite modules to make them compatible with PowerShell Core to complete the move. Much of this work must be undertaken by Microsoft themselves. A large number of modules have been written for Windows PowerShell over the years.

This book favors a PowerShell is PowerShell stance. There are differences between Windows PowerShell and PowerShell Core, but these details sit on the edge. Knowing how to use the help system, and how to explore objects, how to use PowerShell to meet an objective, is vital in either case.