We’ve been teaching and writing about Windows PowerShell for a long time. When Don began contemplating the first edition of this book, he realized that most Power- Shell writers and teachers—including himself—were forcing our students to approach the shell as a kind of programming language. Most PowerShell books are into “scripting” by the third or fourth chapter, yet more and more PowerShell students were backing away from that programming-oriented approach. Those students wanted to use the shell as a shell, at least at first, and we simply weren’t delivering a learning experience that matched that desire.

So he decided to take a swing at it. A blog post on WindowsITPro.com proposed a table of contents for this book, and ample feedback from the blog’s readers fine-tuned it into the book you’re about to read. He wanted to keep each chapter short, focused, and easy to cover in a short period of time—because we know administrators don’t have a lot of free time, and often have to learn on the fly. When PowerShell v3 came out, it was obviously a good time to update the book, and Don turned to long-time collaborator Jeffery Hicks to help out.