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Chapters 1 : Before you begin

 Chapter 1:  Before you begin In an advisory board meeting at my school, I asked our board members what is the most important thing for new hires to be able to do.  As an instructor, I often am thinking of the skills my students need to know when they walk into a workplace.  So, I was a bit surprised when he responded,  Find a way to duplicate yourself.  That is where PowerShell comes in.  While most administrators can figure out the GUI, clicking around until they find the screen where they need to change something, it's time consuming and doesn't replicate well.  As a programmer by trade, I am often watching people complete their job and thinking, "There has got to be an easier way to do this."  Especially when I see people do the exact same keystrokes multiple times... PowerShell offers you the ability to do pretty much anything you can do in a GUI, but do it from the command line.  Therefore, since you can write it from the command l...
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Introduction - Learning PowerShell in a Month of Lunches

Introduction As an instructor at a small community college, I am often looking for new ways to teach useful things to my students.  Our school has AAS degrees, so I only get 2 years to teach students everything I can before they graduate and go into the workforce.  Each class needs to be as useful as possible, so we avoid wasting their time. At our advisory board meeting this August, one of our members told me that the first thing he tells new hires is: "Find a way to replicate yourself."  With the economy the way it is, employees who want to get ahead will learn quickly how to make themselves indispensable.  When I asked him to elaborate, he said, "Teach them scripting with PowerShell." Our school doesn't have a class on PowerShell, but I do teach a Microsoft Server class.  This seemed to be the best way for me to get started.  I understood the basic concept of PowerShell, but honestly, I had no use for it on a day-to-day basis, and therefore, never took t...
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