As just announced by O’Reilly, the PowerShell Cookbook is now available!
As your experience grows in any technology, you learn and benefit from the combination of two distinct types of knowledge:
- What can I do with the technology?
- How do I accomplish a specific task in that technology?
Question #1 focuses on the technology. You learn the answers to #1 from training, exploration, podcasts, and technology-specific books. This is where you immerse yourself in the looping constructs, variable syntax, etc. In PowerShell’s case, that’s (not surprisingly) turned out to be PowerShell in Action
, along with the many other excellent PowerShell learning resources out there.
Question #2 focuses on the task. You know what you want to do, and the only think in your way is technology. You learn the answers to #2 from experience, and lots of it. Experience is in short supply when you first start working with a technology, so blog posts and internet searches often tentatively fill that void. Until the O’Reilly cookbook arrives, that is, at which point you have pre-canned solutions to many of your most vexing questions. In PowerShell’s case, we finally have a resource to fill that void – the PowerShell Cookbook.
The PowerShell Cookbook focuses squarely on showing you how to use PowerShell to get your job done. It builds on a huge base of distilled knowledge, and includes:
- Solutions to the most popular and searched-for TechNet / Script Center topics
- Scripts that address the most common community, newsgroup, and new user questions
- Scripts that wrap around and hide the complexity of advanced (but very useful) PowerShell scripting techniques
- Task-based introduction to all of PowerShell’s major features
In addition to all of this pre-distilled knowledge, the cookbook’s appendix provides a very thorough and complete PowerShell reference. Thorough enough to be a book all of its own, but now expanded and finally in a printed format. It includes:
- A complete reference to the PowerShell language and environment
- An exhaustive regular expression reference, along with PowerShell examples
- A complete listing of all PowerShell automatic variables
- A guide to PowerShell’s standard verbs, which helps you write scripts that match the PowerShell naming guidelines
- Hand-picked lists of the .NET classes, WMI classes, and COM objects most useful to system administrators
- An exhaustive String and DateTime formatting reference, along with PowerShell examples
Since the book focuses so strongly on the same crowd that frequents Microsoft ScriptCenter, I tapped Dean Tsaltas (one of the original Scripting Guys) for feedback and a forward. Perhaps my greatest disappointment about the book is that we didn’t have room for his fantastic cover quote. I would be remiss to relegate his unbiased opinion to the Cavern-Of-Thoughts-Unpublished, so I include it here:
"Must-read of the season! A stunning achievement! Tantalizing, witty, and entirely satisfying. Oh, wait -- that's the foreword."
Dean Tsaltas, Scripting Guy emeritus, author of the Foreword.
So, enjoy the book — or at least the foreword :)