Part 1 Learning PowerShell

1 Welcome to PowerShell

1.1 What is PowerShell?

1.2 Soul of a new language

1.3 Brushing up on objects

1.4 Dude! Where’s my code?

1.5 Summary

2 The basics

2.1 Command concepts and terminology

2.2 Parsing and PowerShell

2.3 Pipelines and commands

2.4 Formatting and output

2.5 Summary

3 Working with types

3.1 Type management in the wild, wild west

3.2 Basic types and literals

3.3 Type conversions

3.4 Summary

4 Operators and expressions

4.1 Arithmetic operators

4.2 The assignment operators

4.3 Comparison operators

4.4 The pattern matching operators

4.5 Logical and bitwise operators

4.6 Summary

5 Advanced operators and variables

5.1 Operators for working with types

5.2 The unary operators

5.3 Grouping, subexpressions, and array subexpressions

5.4 Array operators

5.5 Property and method operators

5.6 The PowerShell format operator -F

5.7 Redirection and the redirection operators

5.8 Variables

5.9 Summary

6 Flow control in scripts

6.1 Using the if/elseif/else statement

6.2 The while loop

6.3 The do/while loop

6.4 The for loop

6.5 The foreach loop

6.6 Labels, break, and continue

6.7 The PowerShell switch statement

6.8 Flow control using cmdlets

6.9 The value of statements

6.10 Summary

7 Functions and scripts

7.1 Function basics

7.2 Formal parameters and the param statement

7.3 Returning values from functions

7.4 Using functions in a pipeline

7.5 Managing functions

7.6 Scripts at long last

7.7 Summary

8 Scriptblocks and objects

8.1 Scriptblock basics

8.2 Building and manipulating objects

8.3 A closer look at the type-system plumbing

8.4 Extending the PowerShell language

8.5 Type extension

8.6 Building code at runtime

8.7 Summary

9 Errors, exceptions, and script debugging

9.1 Error handling

9.2 Dealing with errors that terminate execution

9.3 Script debugging

9.4 Nested prompts and breakpoints

9.5 Low-level tracing

9.6 The PowerShell event log

9.7 Summary

Part 2 Using PowerShell

10 Processing text, files, and XML

10.1 Processing unstructured text

10.2 File processing

10.3 XML processing

10.4 Summary

11 Getting fancy—.NET and WinForms

11.1 Using .NET from PowerShell

11.2 PowerShell and the Internet

11.3 PowerShell and graphical user interfaces

11.4 Summary

12 Windows objects: COM and WMI

12.1 Working with COM in PowerShell

12.2 Working with WMI in PowerShell

12.3 So which object model should I choose?

12.4 Summary

13 Security, security, security

13.1 Introduction to security

13.2 Security modeling

13.3 Securing the PowerShell environment

13.4 Signing scripts

13.5 Writing secure scripts

13.6 Summary
 
Comparing PowerShell to other languages
Admin examples
The PowerShell grammar
index