Effective PowerShell: The Free eBook

PowerShell MVP and prodigious PowerShell blogger Keith Hill has converted his very popular Effective PowerShell blog series into a FREE Ebook.  You can download it HERE.

Here is a taste of you'll you'll get:

Table of Contents

Introduction 1 

Item 1: Four Cmdlets that are the Keys to Discovery within PowerShell 1 

Key #1: Get-Command 1 

Key #2: Get-Help 2 

Key #3: Get-Member ..5 

Key #4: Get-PSDrive .6 

PowerShell 2.0 Update 7 

Item 2: Understanding Output 8 

Output is Always a .NET Object 8 

Function Output Consists of Everything That Isn't Captured 9 

Other Types of Output That Can't Be Captured .. 11 

Item 3: Know What Objects Are Flowing Down the Pipeline  12 

Item 4: Output Cardinality - Scalars, Collections and Empty Sets - Oh My! .. 15 

Working with Scalars  15 

Working with Collections .. 16 

Working with Empty Sets .. 17 

Item 5: Use the Objects, Luke. Use the Objects!  19 

Item 6: Know Your Output Formatters . 22 

Item 7: Understanding PowerShell Parsing Modes  31 

Item 8: Understanding ByPropertyName Pipeline Bound Parameters  35 

Item 9: Understanding ByValue Pipeline Bound Parameters  38 

Item 10: Regular Expressions - One of the Power Tools in PowerShell .. 42 

PowerShell 2.0 Update  43 

Item 11: Comparing Arrays  43 

Item 12: Use Set-PSDebug -Strict In Your Scripts - Religiously . 45 

PowerShell 2.0 Update  47 

Item 13: Commenting Out Lines in a Script File .. 47 

PowerShell 2.0 Update  48