My Experience with Powershell Month of Lunches Pt 6

Chapter 15 Variables a place to store your stuff

For someone who has used powershell for a little while here, most of the chapter seemed pretty straightforward. However trying to look at it from someone brand new to powershell(and in some ways I definitely still am) this is a very eye-opening chapter.

I can definitely imagine someone who has never done any kind of scripting before, being introduced to variables. It must be mind-blowing. Fortunately this chapter does what I thought was a great walk-through of stepping the reader through the process of not only using variables, but thinking logically of ways to use them. The examples of increasing complexity were great and were very well thought out. You can tell Don specifically planned out the examples to minimize the possible brain explosions.

There were also some cool uses of the ` (backtick) which I was not aware of… Learn something new everyday 🙂

Chapter 16 Input and Output

And…..That’s what she said….. Ugh sorry, I couldn’t resist. This was a short chapter, I thought it was over very quickly.  This chapter delves into how you want things to appear as output.

The thing I really like about this chapter, and am increasing liking about the book is the diagrams. In this particular chapter their were diagrams illustrating the difference between write-host and write-output. Which I thought was great, almost without any words needed, you instantly understand how they relate to the pipeline.

That’s all I got…it was a short chapter 🙂

Chapter 17 You call this scripting?

It is so nice when you come across a chapter that helps you with something you are currently working on. This chapter introduced putting your commands into a ps1 file for the first time, along with adding parameters and comment based help.

I am currently working on a huge script, and it is a big enough script that I am adding comment based help to it, which is the first time I have added help to a script. This chapter not only explained the basics of it which were helpful but also provided how to get more information about adding help to scripts.