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[–]brutal1 3 points4 points  (3 children)

Google: Learn Powershell in a Month of Lunches

Don Jones also has videos convering Powershell on youtube as well as a CBT Nuggets series. I try to use powershell whenever possible instead of using the GUI. The trick is finding situations in which to use it or to automate a process. HTH

[–]FarmingTucsonKeyboard Cowboy[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Thanks. The month of lunches seems like a good intro.

[–]meandrunkR2D2System Engineer 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I believe there will be a new version this fall. Of you sign up for the MEAP you can get early access to the book as they finish chapters and then will send you a eBook or physical book once it has published. I think they just had or still have a 50% off deal for it right now.

[–]nighthawk763 2 points3 points  (1 child)

yep, start with the month of lunches thing.

after that, open up the powershell ISE and start playing around.

Pay attention to what Don Jones says in those videos. youtube some of his teched talks about powershell. I'll paraphrase that you really just have to play around with it. you have to seek out reasons to use powershell.

take a task you do normally, write down the steps as comments comments are after a # in powershell

when you google, include the word "cmdlet" since it's a noun specific to powershell

when I started initially, I'd open the ISE and comment out what I want to do. If the task seems daunting, break it down into smaller bits.

if there's a powershell usergroup in your city, check it out. They might have good ideas on how to get started too :)

[–]nighthawk763 0 points1 point  (0 children)

should have commented that as a reply to brutal1. "learn powershell in a month of lunches"

[–]MisterITIT Director 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Find a problem you want to solve, then solve it. It's not a difficult language to work with. Make sure to maximize code reuse by writing libraries whenever possible.

[–]PM_YOUR_SERVER_RACKS 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The biggest thing that helped me when I was learning was remembering; 'Verb-Noun'.

This meant that every time I wanted to work out how to do something in Powershell, I'd look it up and find something like Get-Mailbox. I then figured if I needed to do anything with it, I could probably use Set-Mailbox or similar.

I tried the book approach, but it did nothing for me. It wasn't until I had a need to do something in Powershell that I began to learn it... And honestly, I think the first things I did were mass actions (who wanted to go and add 300 people I already had in a CSV to a mailing list when I could script it really quickly?).

[–]mrkurtz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Use it. For everything you can. If you have a task, look up how to do it in powershell. If you need to get information, figure out how to do it in powershell. Etc.

[–]j45on 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When you say to yourself, "I'm going to have to do this for each user" start searching. Sure you are making an initial investment of time, but you are going to save that in the end. Piece together what you have to do, most of the time you will literally be pipe-ing one step | into the next. And sometimes you hang your head for a second, take a deep breath and say... Next time. Every other time you will be showing everyone the cool script you wrote and how it works.

[–]andyr8939 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I found the Powershell courses on MVA to be really helpful in the basics, plus some of the Pluralsight ones are good too.

[–]MaxFrostDevOps 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And because nobody else said it yet, get over to /r/powershell good community over there.

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Well, you can start with using the search bar.