Automation of mundane daily chores of any IT establishment is essential in today’s world. I would rather spend a day to automate a task that takes only 5 minutes to complete because when automated, it now can be completed in fraction of that time, repeatedly, all while removing possibility of human errors. My first automation attempts can be traced back to DOS 6.22 batch files. Albeit nothing compared to what you can achieve today with PowerShell, it was still achieving basic premise of automation.

When I first got my hands on PowerShell, my world of system administration and automation opened up. Compared to VBScript in which my skills were mediocre at best, it took me much less time to ramp up and automate complex tasks. Combine that with PowerShell’s far reaching expandability while maintaining relative ease made it one of my strong suits.

It was naturally a quick “yes” when PACKT Publishing presented opportunity to review new PowerShell book “PowerShell 3.0 Advanced Administration Handbook”.

It is important to mention that I am not paid by PACKT Publishing to review this book. This review and opinions are genuinely my own.

Authors

Sherif Talaat and Haijun Fu were both relatively unknown to me, mostly due to my lack of involvement in PowerShell MVP community. Both are PowerShell MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional). Both aptly knowledgeable to cover such topic of the book.

The Book

Learning PowerShell is a broad subject. There are many Microsoft products that use PowerShell today and writing advanced administration book for it means providing coverage to all possible products. I was happy to see that the book wasn’t limited to a particular product. Not only that, I was surprised to find coverage that included Microsoft’s cloud offerings Windows Azure and Office 365 as well!

The book is organized in well flowing chapters. The unassuming flow of chapters takes readers through introduction to PowerShell and dives deeper in different details as it goes on. Each chapter is sprinkled with good mix of theory and accompanying code examples to drive it home. This helps readers grasp unfamiliar concepts quickly and with relative ease.

Conclusion

If you are new to PowerShell or just looking to refresh your knowledge to cover new features of PowerShell v3.0 such as PowerShell workflow, this book serves each reader well.

Hope you find this review helpful. Cheers!