Foreword

In writing a book for Windows PowerShell, my co-author and I had some difficult decisions to make. PowerShell is a terrifically powerful environment; however, with all that power comes a lot of complexity. It's fascinating, but it's also easy to find yourself slipping out of the real easy-administrative-scripting world and into a more hardcore .NET Framework developer's world. We decided to keep our audience, the Windows administrator, firmly in mind. After all, that's where both Jeffery and I come from, and we know what a pragmatic, practical bunch administrators are. Typically, administrators just want a tool that'll let them get their jobs done with the minimum amount of additional fuss or effort.

That said, administrators' specific needs vary pretty widely. So we decided to stick with the good old "80/20" rule: Cover the information that 80% of the audience will use 80% of the time, and consider everything else to be "out of scope." We did this not out of a desire to "dumb down" the book or provide a less-comprehensive work, but rather to keep the book focused on what most administrators will need to use most of the time. Doing so keeps the discussion free of distractions which most readers won't find useful, allowing most readers to learn how to use PowerShell as quickly as possible.

And learning is really the key goal of this book: While we've included a good deal of reference material, it's not intended as a reference, but rather as a learning tool. So whenever we needed to make a tradeoff between "easy, clear instruction" and "comprehensive coverage," we've generally erred on the side of ease and clarity. As more Windows administrators become familiar with, and proficient in, PowerShell we'll likely get feedback about features or techniques that we didn't include. We want that feedback! In fact, visit www.SAPIENPress.com to give us that feedback when it occurs to you; the time will doubtless arrive for an "advanced" PowerShell title that's more comprehensive and doesn't need to worry about teaching the basics, and your feedback will help craft that title.

In the meantime, we hope you'll find this title useful. We've tried to focus on the core PowerShell techniques that you'll get immediate use from, while throwing in a good bit of more intermediate and advanced material to keep you learning for months, or even years, to come. We've tried to stay away from detailed "under the hood" explanations that, while certainly interesting, don't really help you learn or use PowerShell better. We've tried to keep examples short and easy to follow, so that you can use them as the basis for your learning.

And, speaking of examples, you'll find them all for download at www.SAPIENPress.com. Although we've made every effort to ensure the technical accuracy of these examples, changing products, typesetting errors, and other problems are sure to occur; by making the examples available for download, we can ensure that they're kept up-to-date and corrected. The Web site will also contain an "errata" list of any changes that we need to make to the text in order to keep it correct and accurate.

Thanks for choosing this book for your PowerShell education. Now, dive in: PowerShell awaits.