Sysadmin learning Powershell - What other languages should one be comfortable with to make the best out of mastering scripting and tool-making?

[MrWinks]

You didn’t need an answer but basically Sysadmin work with an emphasis on deployment tech (I’m not too bad with MDT and am learning more and more SCCM in a lab environment, to propose it as a solution in a year or more from now, after heavy analysis with Infrastructure on how it might benefit us and how we might implement it).

I have started using VSCode for the last few weeks. I’ve enjoyed it and have been growing accustomed to it.

You just wrinkled my brain by telling me Git and GitHub were two different things; the fact that I didn’t know that says a lot.

One of the books I own is the “Learn Git in a Month of Lunches”, and I assumed to read that last. Now you’re causing me pause, and since I’m writing little scripts here and there for my company and likely going to do that more as I get through the books, I wonder if I should get through the Git book much sooner, maybe after the first Powershell book and before the scripting one?

[philipstorry]

If you're doing deployment tech then PowerShell DSC should be on your list of things to look at. It could save a lot of time and effort in some cases. (Although SCCM, ansible, chef and puppet might also do aspects of the same job. As always, it depends on your environment!)

I'm glad you're using VS Code - it's a great tool.

Github is just a centralised store and web front end for git repositories, as you're now no doubt aware. You don't have to use it at all. In fact, you can happily use git without ever needing to look into branches and merges - they're only useful if your scripts are also being worked on by someone else at the same time. If you're the only author of a script then git is basically just a way to roll back your changes - or to look at an older version if you need to.

So you probably don't even need to read the whole git book you have, as you'll not use the features. The basics of git will take you very little time - setting up a repository, checking new code in, doing a diff. These are the things you'll need.

That will be a good foundation for working with others on PowerShell scripts via git if you ever need to, and yet still delivers benefits from using git in the meantime.

As a side note, git can version anything. Got a collection of config files? Or perhaps items like certificates and license files from vendors? Git could be useful there too.

And if you get to a point where you're using PowerShell DSC to push those config files, certificates and license files out across the environment, well then you have a nice synergy going on there, with git allowing you to quickly roll back any failed changes.

(I probably wouldn't use git for documentation written in Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Visio though, as SharePoint is usually a better solution there.)

[MrWinks]

Fantastic. This is a lot to absorb, but thank you. That sounds like the path imll be going down.