Today I will talk about a book  titled  ” Windows PowerShell 3.0 Step by Step” by Ed Wilson;O’Reilly Media, Inc.

When I first heard that Ed Wilson is writing a book on Windows PowerShell I was greatly excited. I am a great fan of PowerShell and by all means Ed is the right person to write a book on it.

I am a great fan of his blog http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/ too.

My rating for this book is a full five !

I consider this book as my PowerShell Bible, and its been always a reference guide for me since I started reading it for the first time.

First of this book talks about the latest version of PowerShell,ie 3.0.  The book is well organized into 3 sections.

First section talks about Windows PowerShell overview and its fundamental role.

Second section covers Windows PowerShell scripting.

Third section covers specific applications such as AD, Exchange etc.

There are very clear instructions to find your best starting point for this book, however if you are really new to PowerShell, then reading the whole book is definitely recommended.

Whole lot of good exercises are made available at the end of each chapter which will ensure that you learn the concepts really well.

When I started reading the initial chapters I was wowed by the amount of tips/tricks provided by the author for his readers. There is a PowerShell script which is provided for every tip which can be leveraged by the reader for his/her use. These tips/tricks are always useful for users who started of with PowerShell recently and also it will come handy for expert users.

Example – Chapter 1 talks about a script which will add both the Windows PowerShell ISE and the Windows PowerShell console to both the Start screen and the taskbar on Windows 8.

There are plenty of tips available in the book which will be well appreciated by both beginners and experts.

Here is a quick glance of what each chapter talks about -

Chapter 1  – Empowers the reader to get started with PowerShell and explains a great deal of information on how sufficient help can be obtained for cmdlets.

Chapter 2 – Talks a great deal about cmdlets(The heart and soul of PowerShell).

Chapter 3- The focus of this chapter is on Power Shell providers. There is great amount of details available in this chapter.

Chapter 4 – This is one of my favorite chapter of this book. This chapter talks about capability of PowerShell to do remote connections and run commands for a remote system.

Chapter 5 – Is all about scripting. There are lot of real world examples and that’s the beauty of this book.

Chapter 6,7- All about functions and modules.

Chapter 8 -  Great amount of changes was happened for PowerShell ISE in 3.0(Integrated Scripting Engine) and this chapter deep dives into ISE.

Chapter 9 – I consider this chapter very important. This chapter talks about Profiles and trust me, there are a lot of good examples provided.

Chapter 10,11,12 and 13 – Great resource for learning WMI. Again one of my favorite chapters and anytime reference point.

Chapter 14 – Talks about CMI Cmdlets.

Chapter 15,16 and 17  – If you are a Windows Admin,then you just cant afford to miss reading these chapters. These chapters provide you with great deal of information on managing AD(Active Directory) with PowerShell.

Chapter 18 and 19 – Talks about debugging scripts and handling errors. Great resource to ensure that PowerShell scripts are error free.

Chapter 20 – Focuses on Exchange administration.

Where can you download this book

You can download the book from  http://oreilly.com/ and do a search using the title or you access here to get you routed directly to this book.

Print ISBN:

978-0-7356-6339-8 | ISBN 10: 0-7356-6339-4

Ebook ISBN:

978-0-7356-6337-4| ISBN 10: 0-7356-6337-8

Conclusion

This book by all means is worth every penny and any IT professional would love to get a copy of this book and maintain it as a reference.

Thanks for reading and keep watching this space for more.