Book Review: Windows PowerShell 3.0 First Steps by Ed Wilson

PowerShell is a very powerful scripting language for Windows - it's a Swiss Army knife for Windows developers & server administrators. What I love about it is its low barrier of entry. It's easy to get started considering that the shell & ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment) come along with the Windows OS (Windows Vista & higher) so you practically need nothing extra to learn. The third version of PowerShell comes built into Windows 8 & Windows Server 2012. You have to explicitly install it if you're using an older version of Windows.

Windows PowerShell 3.0 First Steps is an excellent book for absolute beginners, written by a PowerShell expert, Ed Wilson, who has hugely contributed to the PowerShell community and product. This book has all the characteristics that make it a good technical book. With gentle hand-holding, the author walks you through the important commands (or cmdlets). There are plenty of snippets that you can try out while you read along.

The author points out differences from older versions of PowerShell where relevant. This knowledge can be useful if you have to work on an older version of Windows. I liked learning the fact that the number of verbs grew from 40 to 60 from Windows PowerShell 1.0 to 2.0 but in version 3 there are just two additional verbs: Optimize & Resize and that out of the nearly 2,000 cmdlets (and functions) on Windows 8, over 25 percent of them use the verb Get.

I received an ebook copy of this book via the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program.

Also see: HOW TO download a list of files from a website with a PowerShell script