Now that my content has been migrated to the scripting blog, this will be the landing page for the series and I’ll be trying to update all the links. 

Learning PowerShell can be very useful for people with programming experience. Whether you’re currently a developer, dev-ops, or an admin you can get some serious use out of being familiar with PowerShell. You might think its just a version of command prompt with an eye-burning color scheme, but it really is a full scripting language with lots of nice tie ins.

PowerShell is geared towards IT admins and made easy to learn with lots of nice shortcuts, and auto-complete. Unfortunately a lot of those shortcuts might lead to some issues for programmers who are just kind of winging it, and I wanted to write this series to help clear up some of those issues I see the most often.

Who is this series for?

People with general programming knowledge (C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, Python, etc) who are looking to pick up PowerShell.

I’m going to assume you understand lots of programming concepts already, including things like:

• Variables
• Object models
• Flow Control (loops, if statements, switch statements)
• Writing and using functions with arguments

I’m going to cover some of the quirks of PowerShell to help you pick up the language, avoid making mistakes or doing extra work, and get scripting quickly. Let me know if there are topics you’d like to see added.

If you find this helpful don’t forget to rate, comment and share 🙂

I’m aiming to write a post every 2 weeks or so to start. I’ll keep this post updated with links to the different parts of the series as they come out.

1. Basic Syntax – CMDLETS
2. Basic Syntax – Variables, Objects, and Data Types 
3. What happened to my operators? (==,!=, >=, etc)
4. How to write function the right way
   • Doing more with functions: Taking Parameters on the Pipe
   • Doing more with functions: Verbose logging, Risk mitigation, Parameter Sets, etc
   • Adding help data to functions
5. Double quotes, single quotes, and other quirks with strings
   • Here Strings
6. Let the switch statement do some extra work for you!