Learn Windows PowerShell 3 in a Month of Lunches, Second Edition is an innovative tutorial designed for administrators. Just set aside one hour a day—lunchtime would be perfect—for a month, and you'll be automating Windows tasks faster than you ever thought possible. You'll start with the basics—what is PowerShell and what can you do with it. Then, you'll move systematically through the techniques and features you'll use to make your job easier and your day shorter. This totally revised second edition covers new PowerShell 3 features designed for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.

Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.

What's Inside

Learn PowerShell from the beginning—no experience required!
Covers PowerShell 3, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2012
Each lesson should take you one hour or less

About the Technology

PowerShell is both a language and an administrative shell with which you can control and automate nearly every aspect of Windows. It accepts and executes commands immediately, and you can write scripts to manage most Windows servers like Exchange, IIS, and SharePoint.

Experience with Windows administration is helpful. No programming experience is assumed.

Table of Contents

Before you begin
Meet PowerShell
Using the help system
Running commands
Working with providers
The pipeline: connecting commands
Adding commands
Objects: data by another name
The pipeline, deeper
Formatting—and why it's done on the right
Filtering and comparisons
A practical interlude
Remote control: one to one, and one to many
Using Windows Management Instrumentation
Multitasking with background jobs
Working with many objects, one at a time
Security alert!
Variables: a place to store your stuff
Input and output
Sessions: remote control with less work
You call this scripting?
Improving your parameterized script
Advanced remoting configuration
Using regular expressions to parse text files
Additional random tips, tricks, and techniques
Using someone else's script
Never the end
PowerShell cheat sheet