Book Image

Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting (Second Edition) - Second Edition

By : Brenton J.W. Blawat
Book Image

Mastering Windows PowerShell Scripting (Second Edition) - Second Edition

By: Brenton J.W. Blawat

Overview of this book

PowerShell scripts offer a handy way to automate various chores. Working with these scripts effectively can be a difficult task. This comprehensive guide starts from scratch and covers advanced-level topics to make you a PowerShell expert. The first module, PowerShell Fundamentals, begins with new features, installing PowerShell on Linux, working with parameters and objects, and also how you can work with .NET classes from within PowerShell. In the next module, you’ll see how to efficiently manage large amounts of data and interact with other services using PowerShell. You’ll be able to make the most of PowerShell’s powerful automation feature, where you will have different methods to parse and manipulate data, regular expressions, and WMI. After automation, you will enter the Extending PowerShell module, which covers topics such as asynchronous processing and, creating modules. The final step is to secure your PowerShell, so you will land in the last module, Securing and Debugging PowerShell, which covers PowerShell execution policies, error handling techniques, and testing. By the end of the book, you will be an expert in using the PowerShell language.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 1. Introduction to PowerShell

I write this as PowerShell approaches its 10th birthday since its release. PowerShell has come a long way since that time.

For me, PowerShell has gone from being a speculative replacement for a mixture of VBScript, C#, and Perl to a complex language with a great community.

This book is split into a number of sections. Much of the book is intended to act as a reference. We will cover the following topics in this book:

  • Exploring PowerShell fundamentals
  • Working with data
  • Automating with PowerShell
  • Extending PowerShell

In the first section of this book, while exploring the PowerShell fundamentals, we will look at the use of language and cover as many building blocks as possible.

In this chapter, we will briefly look at a number of short, diverse topics:

  • What is PowerShell?
  • Quick reference
  • PowerShell editors
  • PowerShell on Linux