Author: Maki Kato

On Friday, I’ll be speaking at the Perl and Raku Conference in the Cloud. My topic? PowerShell for Perl Experts. Yep, this is a techie topic for advanced developers.

PowerShell is Microsoft’s automation scripting language and shell. PowerShell allows the automation of just about any aspect of Windows Server and Microsoft’s enterprise software, including Azure. I’d been wanting to learn PowerShell for some time now, and this spring, I finally dedicated some time to this project. What have I learned?

• PowerShell is a programming language but it’s also a shell, which means it’s a bit quirky.
• Microsoft has put a lot of effort into making the automation story compelling.
• If you want to automate Microsoft stuff, PowerShell is absolutely worth learning.
• There were more resources for new administrators than programmers.

If you want to get started with PowerShell, here are my favorite resources:

Learning sites:

• https://exercism.io/my/tracks/powershell
• https://github.com/vexx32/PSKoans

Slack channel

• https://powershell.slack.com/

Book:

• PowerShell in Action 3rd Edition by Bruce Payette and Richard Siddaway

Links to links:

• https://github.com/janikvonrotz/awesome-powershell

Microsoft Documentation:

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/

Modules repo:

• https://www.powershellgallery.com/

Static Code checker:

• PSScriptAnalyzer

Cheatsheet:

• PowerShell cheatsheet

Have you learned PowerShell? If so, what resources did you find to be the most valuable?