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 line, you can also write a script to do it.  Therefore, when you need to do 'something', you can run your script with a few parameters, and skip all the clicking.  

I believe that most companies these days would be extremely grateful to have an administrator who can accomplish the task in 10 seconds (by running a script) over the 5-10 minutes it takes to navigate through the GUI.  

This book is broken into roughly 30 chapters, that should be accomplished in less than an hour (about 40 minutes to read the chapter, and about 20 minutes to play with the new knowledge, doing the labs).  So far, I've decided I need about an hour to play with the labs.  Not because they are hard, but because I want to keep playing around.  They do give you the answers, which is kind.  :)

I setup a VM with Windows Server, to give me a bit more options to play with, and to make sure I don't break my personal machine.  You can go down the Oracle Box or VM Ware options.  

Let's get started!