We’ve been teaching and writing about Windows PowerShell for a long time. When Don began contemplating the first edition of this book, he realized that most PowerShell writers and teachers—including himself—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 he 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. He wanted to keep each chapter short, focused, and easy to cover in a short period of time—because we know administrators don’t have a lot of free time, and often have to learn on the fly. When PowerShell v3 came out, it was obviously a good time to update the book, and Don turned to long-time collaborator Jeffery Hicks to help out.

We both 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. We 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.

We 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 our demonstrations of key techniques. We’ve also co-authored Learn PowerShell Toolmaking in a Month of Lunches, which offers the same day-at-a-time approach to learning PowerShell’s scripting and tool-creation capabilities.

If you need any further help, we encourage you to log on to www.PowerShell.org. We both answer questions in several of the discussion forums there, and we’d be happy to try and get you out of whatever you’re stuck on. The site is also a great portal into the robust and active PowerShell community—you can learn about the annual Scripting Games, the in-person PowerShell Summit, and about all of the regional and local user groups and PowerShell-related events that happen throughout the year. Get involved—it’s a great way to make PowerShell a more powerful part of your career.

Enjoy—and good luck with the shell.