Learn Windows PowerShell 3 in a Month of Lunches, 2nd Edition

Learn Windows PowerShell 3 in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition is an innovative tutorial designed for administrators. Just set aside one hour a day—lunchtime would be perfect—for a month, and you’ll be automating Windows tasks faster than you ever thought possible. You’ll start with the basics—what is PowerShell and what can you do with it. Then, you’ll move systematically through the techniques and features you’ll use to make your job easier and your day shorter. This totally revised second edition covers new PowerShell 3 features designed for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.

Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.

What’s Inside

• Learn PowerShell from the beginning—no experience required!
• Covers PowerShell 3, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2012
• Each lesson should take you one hour or less

About the Technology

PowerShell is both a language and an administrative shell with which you can control and automate nearly every aspect of Windows. It accepts and executes commands immediately, and you can write scripts to manage most Windows servers like Exchange, IIS, and SharePoint.

Experience with Windows administration is helpful. No programming experience is assumed.

Table of Contents

1. Before you begin
2. Meet PowerShell
3. Using the help system
4. Running commands
5. Working with providers
6. The pipeline: connecting commands
7. Adding commands
8. Objects: data by another name
9. The pipeline, deeper
10. Formatting—and why it’s done on the right
11. Filtering and comparisons
12. A practical interlude
13. Remote control: one to one, and one to many
14. Using Windows Management Instrumentation
15. Multitasking with background jobs
16. Working with many objects, one at a time
17. Security alert!
18. Variables: a place to store your stuff
19. Input and output
20. Sessions: remote control with less work
21. You call this scripting?
22. Improving your parameterized script
23. Advanced remoting configuration
24. Using regular expressions to parse text files
25. Additional random tips, tricks, and techniques
26. Using someone else’s script
27. Never the end
28. PowerShell cheat sheet