That’s Some PS (PowerShell #1)

I seem to pop around interests a lot. That seems to be my personality. How I learn and how I find stuff I’m interested in. I was doing pretty good with JS instruction videos for a month or two there right up until I wasn’t. I had sworn this time it would be different. This time I would go with a thing a stick with it no matter what. So I’m not sure what happened exactly. But I do need to learn me some PowerShell so here goes (from the book I bought last July).

I am learning from Learn Windows PowerShell From a Month of Lunches 3rd edition (copyright 2017). I only mention the copyright because of the strangeness of the 2017 edition book sticking with PowerShell v3 and focusing on Windows 7/Server 2008 R2. Those two operating systems go out of support in January 2020 for crying out loud (as I write this about 8 months away). And I don’t think Windows 8.x or server 2012 is even mentioned. But whatever. It’s fine. I can deal.

When I first started reading the book I was keeping notes inside of an actual .PS1 file, all commented out. Then I’d leave a line non-commented for emphasis. I was running the commands through an PS window, not trying to run the PS1 file. The full notes for the first 3 chapters are in the source code files on my PS code repository on GitHub.

As part of my learning PowerShell – or perhaps the reason for learning PowerShell? – I think it works either way – I will be first dissecting my advib utility in detail, then deciding how best to re-write from scratch in PowerShell and finally writing it from scratch in PowerShell. I’ve already got drafts for the at least three separate posts this will be split into.

I am going to need a separate place for brainstorming what might later fit into the re-write. For instance PS has really fantastic built-in functionality for parsing CSV files (and later PS versions, JSON). I’ll need to make notes to myself where in the book that is so I can come back to it later for reference.

So what I’ll probably do is start a fresh PS blog post and just keep it updated as I go through and make notes. Not sure if I’ll publish that and continue to update it or if I’ll just update it when I’m all done.