Windows PowerShell for Developers: Enhance Your Productivity and Enable Rapid Application Development

by Douglas Finke

The PowerShell platform gives developers seamless integration with legacy .Net code while adding a range previously not seen in a language. With this book you will quickly learn the fundamentals, and move on to writing rich, sophisticated scripts to manage key tasks and processes in your development activities. PowerShell .Net for Developers begins with a cheat sheet of language primitives to get you on your feet with the language. You’ll see how to speed up nearly every aspect of the development process using PowerShell.

Genres: Programming, Computers, Technology

210 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Wes Stahler · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is not often that a technical book makes you rethink how you think. Doug Finke (a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) has achieved just that with this concise PowerShell reference.

He starts out our journey describing PowerShell as a glue language that is as programmable as Perl, Python and Ruby and takes its cues from Unix Shells. The next few steps describe getting started, and include a brief tour. He then shifts into high gear as we learn about template engines, adding PowerShell to our GUI apps and creating graphical applications within PowerShell.

The chapter on “Writing Little Languages in PowerShell” was a welcome paradigm shift for me. Having virtually no experience with Domain Specific Languages (DSL), it was a fun ride as Doug demonstrated how to create a better XML and a creating a DSL using Graphviz. The lessons in this chapter alone were worth the price of the book.

He completes our tour with coverage of integration with COM (Component Object Model – specifically Microsoft Excel) and some of highlights of PowerShell V3 (Workflows, JSON).

This was an enjoyable invigorating read; in fact, I went through it multiple times. I appreciate the developer-centric perspective that Doug displayed throughout the text. Whether you are a seasoned developer or a weekend hacker, if you have any interest in PowerShell, I encourage you to pick up “Windows PowerShell for Developers"

[Roman · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book that provides a lot of clever examples of how you could use PowerShell in day to day work.

Most of the chapters have a feeling of a long blog post rather than a programming book though. After finishing each one I came away thinking "yeah, that's an interesting idea, I should try it some time" rather than feeling confident that I could sit down at a terminal and immediately apply it.

Definitely worth reading, but a bit pricey for the amount of information it contains.

[M Sheik Uduman Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powershell is not just for Administrators. It's elegant syntax help you to write good programs too. This book covers:

Quick introduction
text template transformation
Powershell in UI
Domain specific language using PS
Net.Webclient and Powershell

Concise, Nice and clear content. Worth reading!!

[Kyle]

This wasn't the best book to learn PowerShell with, but I now understand how easy some complex tasks can be. I'll probably return to it once I have a better understanding of the fundamental concepts of PowerShell.

[Ben Rand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly compact book, but some really good ideas of ways to use PowerShell I wouldn't have thought of.

[George Pollard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much better than I thought a book about powershell would be, it has many unexpected but useful examples.

[Paul Castillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for learning Powershell.