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

Working with Objects in PowerShell

Everything we do in PowerShell revolves around working with objects. Objects, in PowerShell, may have properties or methods (or both). It is difficult to describe an object without resorting to this; an object is a representation of a thing or item of data. We might use an analogy to attempt to give meaning to the term.

A book is an object and has properties that describe physical characteristics, such as the number of pages, the weight, or size. It has metadata (information about data) properties that describe the author, the publisher, the table of contents, and so on.

The book might also have methods. A method affects the change on the state of an object. For example, there might be methods to open or close the book or methods to jump to different chapters. A method might also convert an object into a different format. For example, there might...