I often get asked about useful resources for learning PowerShell, in particular what good books are available. So I have compiled a list of PowerShell books that I own and would recommend. (Note: all of the links point to Amazon UK for (my) convenience. Other book sellers and countries are available)
General Windows PowerShell 2.0 - Don Jones and Jeffery Hicks
This is a great book for a beginner to PowerShell either with previous scripting experience.
WMI in Windows Server is a treasure trove of information and well worth investigating, particularly when needing to run reports against many servers. In addition it is possible for third-parties to make use of WMI and store their own information in there. This is true of a recent requirement I had to monitor Citrix Licensing.
Whilst it’s obviously critical to purchase enough licenses for Citrix that you need, its also important to not have too many lying around not in use, since you’ll be wasting money.
Richard Siddaway has posted details of January’s UK PowerShell User Group Event. Microsoft Scripting Guy Ed Wilson will be joining us for a live meeting about PowerShell Best Practises.
“Learn Windows PowerShell best practices as they apply to each stage of the script development lifecycle. See the differences between working interactively from the Windows PowerShell prompt, writing an inline script, adding basic function, advanced functions and finally the implementation of Windows PowerShell Modules.
Both Alan and I have been particularly busy over the last few months, in particular with the upcoming PowerCLI book. So we have had a bigger than expected gap between episodes of the Get-Scripting Podcast , but you’ll be pleased to know that we are back with one of our best episodes to date. We were fortunate enough to get to spend some time talking with Jeffrey Snover , the inventor of PowerShell, for this episode.
Whilst working with Microsoft Support on a performance case we needed to supply them with some Perfmon logs. To do so required creating a User Defined Data Collector Set containing a number of counters. You can obviously do this through the GUI, which is fine for one server, but we needed the logs from around 200 servers.
So we created a Data Collector Set on one server and then saved it out to a template which stores the data in an XML file.
When working with Exchange 2010 it is possible to remotely connect with PowerShell to an Exchange 2010 server without having the Exchange Management tools installed on your local workstation. This is a feature known as implicit remoting. The technique to connect is very straightforward, but to make it not necessary to have to remember the commands I wrapped them up into a function Connect-ExchangeServer which I then stored in my PowerShell profile.
The book ‘PowerShell in Practice’ by Richard Siddaway was published back in June 2010 and I was fortunate enough to have been involved as a tech reviewer for the book during the writing phase. This book is a great resource and is aimed at the Windows Systems Administrator, particularly one who covers a wide variety of areas and perhaps doesn’t necessarily specialise in only one area, say Active Directory or Exchange.
If you have been following my blog for a while you will know that between November 2009 and July 2010 I ran a available for download as a PDF.
You’ll be pleased to know I have spent many hours tidying it up, making links to other cmdlets internal to the document throughout and it has also been thoroughly reviewed by fellow PowerShell MVPs Thomas Lee , Richard Siddaway and Aleksandar Nikolic - I am most appreciative of their efforts in reviewing and the feedback given!
I recently had another article published over at the Simple-Talk Sysadmin site entitled ‘PowerShell Version 2: What is new and why is it important?’.
I hope you find it useful.
Kirk Munro, PowerShell MVP, has announced this year’s PowerGUI PowerPack contest. Create a PowerPack or Add-On for PowerGUI and you’ll be in with a chance of a prize if you are deemed to be one of the winners. The prizes are high value Amazon.com vouchers, however both Alan Renouf and I will testify to the fact that winning can give your profile and IT career a real boost!
So I’d encourage you to enter and believe me you will also learn something too from putting a PowerPack together and feel good for making a community contribution.