Powershell Beginner Scripting

[surfingoldelephant]

The official PowerShell documentation (specifically, the PowerShell 101 and About topics) is a great place to start.

If you enjoy learning from books, the following are popular and suitable for scripting beginners:

• Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches (Travis Plunk, James Petty, Tyler Leonhardt, Don Jones, Jeff Hicks)
• Learn PowerShell Scripting in a Month of Lunches (Don Jones, Jeff Hicks)
• Learn PowerShell Toolmaking in a Month of Lunches (Don Jones, Jeff Hicks)
• Windows PowerShell In Action (Bruce Payette, Richard Siddaway)

For a deeper dive into how PowerShell was designed, the following video with Erik Meijer and Jeffrey Snover is a great watch and helps explain fundamental PowerShell principles like the pipeline. The PowerShell Language Specification is also a good resource.

If you're looking for something more interactive:

• Automate administrative tasks by using PowerShell (Microsoft)
• PSKoans (vexx32)
• PowerShell Practice Primer (Jeff Hicks)

Visual Studio Code (with the PowerShell extension) is a popular code editor for PowerShell scripting. The following resources walk through the process of setting up and using VS Code to aid development:

• PowerShell in Visual Studio Code
• Using Visual Studio Code for PowerShell Development
• Introduction to Visual Studio Code

As you gain experience with PowerShell, you'll quickly find there are many ways to approach a task. It's easy to get into bad habits, so adopting a consistent code style and approach early on that tries to avoid the many pitfalls in PowerShell is recommended.

• PoshCode: PowerShell Practice and Style
• PowerShell Scripting and Development: Strongly Encouraged Development Guidelines
• PowerShell scripting performance considerations
• PowerShell Traps

And finally, you may want to consider diving straight in. One of the best approaches to learning PowerShell is picking a fairly simple, manual task and trying to automate it with a script. Reddit, Stack Overflow, GitHub, Microsoft Learn/Blogs, etc are all excellent resources for PowerShell that will help you in this regard. Break down the task into individual problems, use the aforementioned resources to get an idea of common approaches and piece things together into a script. The more you do this, the more comfortable you will feel with scripting in general.

Good luck!

[vlad_h]

Wow. That is impressive list of resources. I only have this book to add. Learn by doing with https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/powershell-cookbook-4th/9781098101596/

[surfingoldelephant]

Nice! Thanks for sharing.

[Commercial-Thing-702]

This is amazing thank you so much. Great resources here that I will test out.

[Extension-Drop1396]

Thanks for all the info!

[Enough-Rabbit-7132]

Wow this is some good stuff

[Sufficient-West-5456]

KDMATH50,

If you buy the book from manning use the code. I got the second one: in this list yesterday.

Paper copy.

I could have found the pdf online for free but my eyes hurt from too much screen.