"An Omega Geek’s Guide to Learning PowerShell"

endjin blog - An Omega Geek’s Guide to Learning PowerShell

In the last 12 months we’ve been doing quite a lot of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) projects helping teams setup Continuous Delivery processes. One of the tenets of Continuous Delivery is “Automate Everything” – which has been a core part of my “work smarter, not harder” ethic for a number of years. The technology that we’ve been using to do this work is one of the hidden gems of the Microsoft Platform – PowerShell. It amazed me that a technology that is over 6 years old still doesn’t seem to have mass adoption within the Microsoft Development Community. While the Alpha Geeks are frothing at the mouth over new tech such as Node / HTML 5 / WinRT, I really hope that more Omega Geeks will do themselves a great favour and start to learn PowerShell.

I’ve spent more of the last year working inside PowerGUI than Visual Studio and I’ve tried hard to take a few of our customers on the learning journey too. I’m very pleased that after doing a quick brown bag session about PowerShell and knocking up a sample framework that one of the DevOps folks took it and ran with it – automating the provisioning of their internal development, test and production environments – from a series of thick word documents that took over 2 man days to work through (and were also horrifically prone to human error) to a series of PowerShell scripts that could automatically provision an environment within a couple of hours.

Thankfully there are a myriad of resources to help you learn PowerShell here are a select that I’ve found very useful:

Free Guides

Books

Blogs & People

Web Casts

Writing testable scripts

Tooling

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I just liked that blog post title. Well and the content too... :P