Windows PowerShell in Action, Second Edition

The Barnes & Noble Review 1+1=2. The Earth is round. The Windows command line stinks. It's time to revisit one of your deepest assumptions about life. If you have the courage, read Windows PowerShell In Action . Author Bruce Payette co-architected the PowerShell language and developed its core implementation, so you won't find a more knowledgeable author. Payette starts by outlining Microsoft's goals for PowerShell, explaining the approach it chose (and why it avoided other alternatives) and previewing some of PowerShell's major advantages (such as its support for the .NET object model). Next, you'll walk through installing PowerShell (it doesn't ship with Vista, XP, or Server 2003 yet, but it'll run with all of them). You'll get comfortable with PowerShell's basic techniques and shortcuts and review some short scripts -- for evaluating basic expressions, processing data, and so forth. Payette illuminates important concepts such as "elastic syntax," pipelines, and "cmdlets" and explains PowerShell's complex parsing rules. Then, step by step, he covers virtually the entire language: types and their advantages; operators and variables, ScriptBlocks, errors, exceptions, debugging, and more. In the final four chapters, you'll put PowerShell to work and gain a deeper understanding of its power. You'll walk through several processing examples utilizing text, files, and XML; learn how to create a WinForms application with PowerShell (and why you might want to); and use PowerShell to control existing COM and WMI objects. Last but not least, it's been said that "you can't throw a dead cat without hitting a security feature" in PowerShell. In "lucky" Chapter 13, Payette introduces those security features and shows exactly how to take advantage of them. Bill Camarda, from the February 2007 (