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I have been using PowerShell for some years now and although I am not very good at it, it has changed the way I work in a Windows environment, I’d like to encourage more people to try it. I believe those that I work with that have taken some time to investigate it have found whole new ways of saving time and Microsoft are making more and more that can only sensibly be managed at the command line.

Having spent many hours on Google and StackOverflow, and having received endless help from others in the community who know more than I, I thought that I’d use the writing of my personal course notes to produce a simple online introductory course available here in the hope that someone else might benefit from them.

I managed to blag my way onto a formal course to try and grow my understanding in a more formal way, my aim with this content is to produce something that will help me solidify the new knowledge from that course and write something that you can consume in small chunks. It won’t be very detailed, it is after all only an introduction, you will likely need to do further research but I hope that it will at least give you a taster, peak your interest and get you started. For the most part I’ll be using Windows PowerShell 5.1 which is now baked into Windows 10 and Server 2016/19

Feel free to comment on the posts, content accuracy, any spelling or grammar errors or even language you don’t understand, but please don’t pose specific coding question, I am not “The Scripting Guy”. Try using the built-in help, do your own research online or else the place for those questions is over at StackOverflow where you will find a very helpful and knowledgable community.

The titles below are what I hope to produce, I’ll add links to each section as I write and publish the page.

• PowerShell Part 1 – Getting Started
  • Getting Started
  • Getting Help
  • Modules, Aliases and Environment Variables
• Powershell Part 2 – Working with Cmdlets
  • General cmdlet constructs
  • Introducing the pipeline
  • Filtering
  • Output
• Powershell Part 3 – More About the Pipeline
  • How is it received and handled
• Powershell Part 4 – PSDrives and PSProviders
  • PSProviders
  • PSDrives
• Powershell Part 5 – Using WMI and CIM
  • Using WMI & CIM
• Powershell Part 6 – Variables
  • What are Variables
  • Using and manipulating variables
• Powershell – Part 7 – Scripting
  • What is Scripting
  • Script constructs
  • Importing data
  • Parameters
  • Error handling
  • Writing Functions and Modules
• Powershell Part 8 – Administering Remote Machines
  • Remote Sessions
  • Implicit Remoting