Mastering PowerShell Scripting - Fourth Edition: Automate and manage your environment using PowerShell 7.1

This complete guide takes you on a tour of PowerShell from the basics to its advanced functionality, helping you automate your tedious and time-consuming system admin tasks

Key Features

• Automate complex tasks, manipulate data, and secure your environment
• Work with dual code for PowerShell 7 and Windows PowerShell to maintain compatibility with older versions
• See PowerShell in action, from learning the fundamentals to creating classes, scripts, and modules

Book Description

PowerShell scripts offer a convenient way to automate various tasks, but working with them can be daunting. Mastering PowerShell Scripting takes away the fear and helps you navigate through PowerShell's capabilities.This extensively revised edition includes new chapters on debugging and troubleshooting and creating GUIs (online chapter). Learn the new features of PowerShell 7.1 by working with parameters, objects, and .NET classes from within PowerShell 7.1.

This comprehensive guide starts with the basics before moving on to advanced topics, including asynchronous processing, desired state configuration, using more complex scripts and filters, debugging issues, and error-handling techniques. Explore how to efficiently manage substantial amounts of data and interact with other services using PowerShell 7.1. This book will help you to make the most of PowerShell's automation features, using different methods to parse data, manipulate regular expressions, and work with Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).

What you will learn

• Optimize code with functions, switches, and looping structures
• Test and debug your scripts as well as raising and catching errors
• Work with objects and operators to test and manipulate data
• Parse and manipulate different data types
• Use jobs, runspaces, and runspace pools to run code asynchronously
• Write .NET classes with ease within PowerShell
• Create and implement regular expressions in PowerShell scripts
• Make use of advanced techniques to define and restrict the behavior of parameters

Who this book is for

This book is for system administrators who want to automate and speed up their processes using PowerShell and Windows PowerShell. You’ll need to know the basics of operating systems, but beginners with no prior experience with PowerShell will have no trouble following along.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to PowerShell
2. Modules and Snap-Ins
3. Working with Objects in PowerShell
4. Operators
5. Variables, Arrays, and Hashtables
6. Conditional Statements and Loops
7. Working with .NET
8. Strings, Numbers, and Dates
9. Regular Expressions
10. Files, Folders, and the Registry
11. Windows Management Instrumentation
12. Working with HTML, XML, and JSON
13. Web Requests and Web Services
14. Remoting and Remote Management
15. Asynchronous Processing
16. Graphical User Interfaces
17. Scripts, Functions, and Script Blocks
18. Parameters, Validation, and Dynamic Parameters
19. Classes and Enumerations
20. Building Modules
21. Testing
22. Error Handling
23. Debugging and Troubleshooting

Chris Dent is an automation specialist with deep expertise in the PowerShell language. Chris is often found answering questions about PowerShell in both the UK and virtual PowerShell user groups. Chris has been developing in PowerShell since 2007 and has released several modules over the years.