I’ve been teaching and writing about Windows PowerShell for a long time. As I began contemplating this book, I realized that most PowerShell writers and teachers—including myself—were forcing our students to approach the shell as a kind of programming language. Most PowerShell books are into “scripting” by the third or fourth chapter, yet more and more PowerShell students were backing away from that programming-oriented approach. Those students wanted to use the shell as a shell, at least at first, and we simply weren’t delivering a learning experience that matched that desire.

So I decided to take a swing at it. A blog post on WindowsITPro.com proposed a table of contents for this book, and ample feedback from the blog’s readers fine-tuned it into the book you’re about to read. I wanted to keep each chapter short, focused, and easy to cover in a short period of time—because I know administrators don’t have a lot of free time, and often have to learn on the fly.

I also wanted a book that would focus on PowerShell itself, and not on the myriad technologies that PowerShell touches, like Exchange Server, SQL Server, System Center, and so on. I truly feel that by learning to use the shell properly, you can teach yourself to administer all of those “PowerShell-ed” server products. So this book tries to focus on the core of using PowerShell. Even if you’re also using a “cookbook” style of book, which provides ready-to-use answers for specific administrative tasks, this book will help you understand what those examples are doing. That understanding will make it easier to modify those examples for other purposes, and eventually to construct your own commands and scripts from scratch.

I hope this book won’t be the only PowerShell education that you pursue. In fact, this book’s companion website, MoreLunches.com, is designed to help you continue that education in small chunks. It offers free videos that correspond to this book’s chapters, letting you see and hear my demonstrations of key techniques. I’ll also be posting supplemental articles, and recommending additional resources for you to investigate.

If you happen to run into me at a conference—I’m a regular at Windows Connections, TechMentor events, and Microsoft TechEd—I hope you’ll come up and say hello. Let me know how this book is working for you, and what other resources you’ve found useful. You can also contact me via email through ConcentratedTech.com, or on manning.com in this book’s discussion forum.

Enjoy—and good luck with the shell.