PowerShell in Depth: An administrator’s guide

PowerShell in Depth is the kind of book you’ll want open on your desk most of the time. With 40 short chapters, each focused on a specific area of PowerShell, you’ll be able to find the answers you need quickly. Each chapter is concise and to-the-point, so you can spend less time reading and more time getting down to the business at hand. It was written by three seasoned PowerShell experts, and every technique has been thoroughly tested. With this book in hand, you’ll be able to consistently and quickly produce production quality, maintainable scripts that will save you countless hours of time and effort.

About this Book

Organized into 40 concise chapters, PowerShell in Depth is the go-to reference for administrators working with Windows PowerShell. Every major shell technique, technology, and tactic is explained and demonstrated, providing a comprehensive reference to almost everything an admin would do in the shell. Written by three experienced authors and PowerShell MVPs, this is the PowerShell book you’ll keep next to your monitor—not on your bookshelf!

This book requires basic familiarity with PowerShell.

What’s Inside

• Covers PowerShell 3.0
• Automating time-consuming tasks
• Managing HTML and XML data
• Background jobs and scheduling
• PowerShell security
• Packaging and deploying scripts
• Standard scripting conventions
• Using the .NET Framework in PowerShell scripts
• Much more

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the Authors

Don Jones, Jeffery Hicks, and Richard Siddaway are Microsoft MVPs who have collectively authored nearly three dozen books on PowerShell and Windows administration.

Table of Contents

PART 1: POWERSHELL FUNDAMENTALS

1. Introduction
2. PowerShell hosts
3. Using the PowerShell help system
4. The basics of PowerShell syntax
5. Working with PSSnapins and modules
6. Operators
7. Working with objects
8. The PowerShell pipeline
9. Formatting

PART 2: POWERSHELL MANAGEMENT

1. PowerShell Remoting
2. Background jobs and scheduling
3. Working with credentials
4. Regular expressions
5. Working with HTML and XML data
6. PSDrives and PSProviders
7. Variables, arrays, hash tables, and scriptblocks
8. PowerShell security
9. Advanced PowerShell syntax

PART 3: POWERSHELL SCRIPTING AND AUTOMATION

1. PowerShell’s scripting language
2. Basic scripts and functions
3. Creating objects for output
4. Scope
5. PowerShell workflows
6. Advanced syntax for scripts and functions
7. Script modules and manifest modules
8. Custom formatting views
9. Custom type extensions
10. Data language and internationalization
11. Writing help
12. Error handling techniques
13. Debugging tools and techniques
14. Functions that work like cmdlets
15. Tips and tricks for creating reports

PART 4: ADVANCED POWERSHELL

1. Working with the Component Object Model (COM)
2. Working with .NET Framework objects
3. Accessing databases
4. Proxy functions
5. Building a GUI
6. WMI and CIM
7. Best practices