Reviewing: Powershell in a Month of Lunches

A book from Don Jones and Jeffry D. Hicks that takes one from little to no knowledge of Powershell to someone that can make a good attempt at figuring things out on their own when they need to.

General Summary

Recently while working on my OSCP certification I found myself using PowerShell quite a bit. As someone who specializes in networking and not system administration with Powershell I wanted to improve in this area. This book had good reviews and seemed like it would be a good entry point to build more knowledge. I maintain a busy schedule so having something that would be practical, and designed for small study blocks was great. If you want to improve with system administration through PowerShell this is a great option.

The Most Important Takeaway?

Although there is a great amount of useful information in the book I wanted to pull out the most important thing that I thought everyone should know.

Chapter 3. On how to better use the help system

I really didn’t have any idea how good the help system really was in PowerShell. Firstly, When I did system administration tasks before the book I would really just google around for what I needed. After getting familiar with the help system it is my first option now when I need a quick review or example. As an example, if I need to interact with a service but don’t know anything I can just run Get-Help, and see what commands are available.

Now, if I think I might just need to look at services on the local device I can use the Get-Help command on Get-Service to get more in depth information. If I understand the SYNTAX portion I can now formulate the command I need.

What if I still don’t really get it and need more help? I can either google for an example, or get an example straight from PowerShell help with the -examples argument. Here we get a basic idea of the command usage. Keep in mind these are the first two of 11 different examples that each get more complex.