Product Description

Windows power users have always envied their friends running UNIX machines for the ease of automation that they enjoy. The traditional Windows command–line shell, cmd.exe, has never been up to par with shells like bash or tcsh, especially when it comes to text processing and process automation.

Windows PowerShell changes all that. This next–generation shell is also a full–blown scripting environment with a real programming language that allows users to access every part of their operating system. Files, registry entries, and COM and .NET objects are all supported by PowerShell, which makes manipulating them a breeze.

Pro Windows PowerShell will show you how to use all this power in your own work. You’ll discover the object–oriented features of the shell and how they help in extracting and manipulating data. You’ll then learn how to use those features to solve real–world problems: manipulating files, working with text, monitoring systems, and performing operations over the network. The book serves as not only a tutorial, but also a reference: the “Real World” part is structured so that it can be read nonlinearly and used as a reference or a cookbook. And you’ll find freely available tools and extensions that will help you do things even faster.

Pro Windows PowerShell is your best companion to the capabilities and power that PowerShell offers you.

What you’ll learn

• See how to solve real problems with Windows PowerShell using a repository of working code.
• Get a sense of “the big picture,” with PowerShell integrating with the outside world. You will discover examples and techniques when dealing with other programs, the operating system, and the network.
• Explore free and open–source tools and extensions that help you get results with Windows PowerShell fast. (No other book has this feature!)

Who is this book for?

Pro Windows PowerShell is targeted at professionals who handle a lot of repetitive tasks. The goal is to show how PowerShell can help script most of those tasks and reduce their burden. The book contains examples on automating typical system administration tasks: configuration, monitoring, network queries, text manipulation, and file operations. The ideas presented will be beneficial to power users needing a better shell and an automation environment, system and network administrators looking to streamline their daily activities, and software developers wishing to optimize their build and deploy process.

About the Apress Pro Series

The Apress Pro series books are practical, professional tutorials to keep you on and moving up the professional ladder.

You have gotten the job, now you need to hone your skills in these tough competitive times. The Apress Pro series expands your skills and expertise in exactly the areas you need. Master the content of a Pro book, and you will always be able to get the job done in a professional development project. Written by experts in their field, Pro series books from Apress give you the hard–won solutions to problems you will face in your professional programming career.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #557575 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 493 pages

About the Author
Hristo Deshev is a group product manager for Telerik, a leading vendor of ASP.NET controls http://www.telerik.com. He has been working on component development for the past several years, focusing on creating rich, highly interactive Ajax solutions. A major goal of his and his team is “taming web development” � applying agile software engineering practices to create robust solutions targeting all modern web browsers and supporting multiple ASP.NET and Visual Studio .NET versions. You can reach Hristo via e-mail at hristo.deshev@telerik.com and on his blog at http://blogs.telerik.com/blogs/twisted_asp_net/.

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Customer Reviews

You Can Teach an Old CMD Prompt New Tricks!
I've been using the command prompt (DOS for your old schoolers) since the days of MS-DOS 2.11. I thought I had done about everything a person could possibly do with the limited scripting abilities of the command prompt -- and then I happened across this book and it was like going back to school.

Windows Powershell is essentially object-oriented programming mashing up with the command line, with some extras thrown in. In this book the author shows you all the new tricks of the trade and will have you looking at ways to automate your Windows tasks in ways you never thought possible.

There are many things that we want to do on our Windows servers or XP/Vista boxes that you have to "hack" or find a third-party utility to do. With Windows Powershell a lot of those tasks can now be brought back "in house" without the need for hacks and kludges.

The nice thing about this book is that it not only talks about Powershell, it also walks you through real-life examples. It's written in many ways like an introductory programming language book would be -- but at the same time the author remembers that most readers will be IT System Admins and not programmers, so he doesn't bury the reader in programming talk to the point they are lost.

If you work in IT and deal with Windows servers you owe it to yourself to check out Windows Powershell and this book. You will find that under the hood of that Windows box is a supercharged '78 Trans-Am just waiting for you to put the pedal to the metal and experience the power!

Superb explanation of a marginal product
Having corresponded with Mr. Deshev while pushing the envelope with Telerik Web Forms controls, I looked forward to his description of Powershell and was not disappointed. It exceptionally thorough and readable. For my purposes the COM interface, described in Chapter 19, provides the most significant advance over the Windows command language. Mr. Deshev makes this sometimes involuted topic transparent.

This book was my introduction to Powershell. Having heard from other software developers about its usefulness I was disappointed, not in Mr. Deshev's work, but in the tool. Powershell fails to automate the most significant parts of the Windows environment for a scripting language, the configuration tools of Control Panel. The functions of some of those tools can be accessed by knowledge of their configuration files, such as the IIS XML metabase, but knowledge about particulars must be developed piecemeal, and most of the tools lack such a configuration file. Perhaps Powershell is a work in progress, but far more progress along those lines will be needed before it becomes an especially useful product.

Powerbook for Powershell
Being a systems admin with a good working knowledge of Powershell, I decided to check out this book to get a better understanding of how Powershell works. I was not disappointed. Never having gotten an introduction to programming concepts this book proved helpful. Just doesn't give you the syntax for performing certain operations but tells you why. Overall a very good book, however, at points it does digress into tangents. Also would have liked some practical real world examples and recommendations on script constructions. I recommend it.