David A. Foreman said
Unlike the previous reviewers, I found this book useful. The book structure is a hybrid meaning it isn't a training guide as to everything you can do with PowerShell. Nor is it a here is every scenario that you can run into in windows administration. It is definitely an introductory book that covers must basics in PowerShell. Then covers a cross sampling of Windows administrations tasks that system administrators need to do. The chapters are broken down by area with a substantial amount of methods to perform administration tasks .The Book gets into some intermediate capabilities like using PowerShell to open excel and building a spreadsheet or writing to a database.
I will agree with one aspect of the comments it would have been nice if in the index he indexed these areas
AR said
While I'm sure this would be useful to Active Directory Admins (who don't like to come up with their own stuff), I found little use in this book. With this title, I expected to find a whole book going through how to write scripts and explaining the different concepts. Instead, there is one chapter of less than 30 pages titled "Scripting with PowerShell" and the rest of the book is pre-written examples of auditing and managing an AD based network. As the reviewer before me stated, this book should have been called Powershell and WMI. I got 10x more information about scripting with PS from a free 10 page tutorial I found online. With this book I was reminded why I don't like Microsoft sponsored books.
The other book by the same Author "Windows Powershell - Step by Step" was a little better but again most of it (2/3) was about AD and WMI.
I wouldn't waste your money on these. There are much better online tutorials for free and they are a much quicker read. However, like I said, if you don't like doing your own work, and your boss is hounding you for something out of PS, then by all means get this book. For the rest of us, save your money.
J. Villapudua said
This book looked really good at first. A lot of practical scripts included, however, they all appear to be basically the same with exception of a WMI call (query). Which brings up the point, that a lot this book is geared towards using WMI. A better title might be Using Powershell and WMI. There is very little in terms of concepts, efficient uses of Powershell, using COM or WinRM. Many of the concepts and techniques are spread through out the book and difficult to locate. If you have a basic understanding of Powershell, need some quick and dirty scripts and don't plan on getting to know it much more in depth this might work for you.
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