Professional Windows PowerShell Programming: Snapins, Cmdlets, Hosts and Providers (Wrox Professional Guides)

Providing you with the programmers approach to understanding Windows PowerShell, this book introduces the concepts, components, and development techniques for building software packages that leverage the power of PowerShell. The author team of PowerShell experts shows you how PowerShell makes writing code easy by providing a runtime engine with its own parser, plus youll discover that with PowerShell, all of the .NET Framework objects become accessible via scripting, making PowerShell a very powerful addition to your toolbox and a popular choice for future development.

User review
Good general content but very poor attention to details
I've found three problems with example code given and a glaring typo in a section heading all within the first 21 pages. This left a bad taste in my mouth from the extra half-hour it took to get the examples to work, as well as making me wonder what else is wrong further along.

That said, the examples did eventually work and the information on how to create the snap-in and get it set up was fine. The source code was readily available via download and at least compiled cleanly, a statement that cannot always be said of other vendors, even MS.

This is one of several books I'm using, and its only purpose to me is for information on the specific tasks relevant to building PowerShell snap-ins, cmdlets and so forth. It will probably be adequate for that purpose.

But it is patently obvious that no one took the book as printed and ran through the examples to make sure they worked, nor even proofed the section heads. I will think twice (or even three times) before ever buying a book by these authors and/or from this publisher again.


User review
It rarely happens that the MSDN documentation is better than a book
I read this book cover to cover. When I bought the book I was hoping to find a concise overview of the PowerShell extensibility. Unfortunately the book seems to be a compilation of definitions usually found in the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) API documentation. The authors didn't convey any passion about the core technology PowerShell. I am always looking for some real world application examples, which I didn't find. I was quite disappointed. But I discovered to my surprise that the MSDN documentation to this topic is actually much better than the book.
My message to the publisher: Have one author with passion and personality write your books.
My message to the interested reader: Buy PowerShell in Action, read Jeffrey Snover's blog and check out the PowerShell MSDN documentation instead.


User review
Best book for Powershell Programming, just one thing ,,.
This very well may be the only decent book regarding PowerShell programming beyond the ordinary PS scripts. If you want to create your own CmdLets, Providers, etc this is the only book I've found that gets you there.

With that said, despite the authors' efforts the book feels more like a reference than a tutorial. The authors' expertise is so deep sometimes they forget to explain all the `obvious` things.

For example, when the PSObject class gets presented to the reader the details are outstanding, as always, but there's very little effort devoted to explaining why this class is needed at all. I've seen other books do better in that matter.

A different example: If you've created your own CmdLets, you already know you can derive from CmdLet or PSCmdLet, the latter being a subclass of the former with additional features but additional requirements. The book totally avoids this discussion (did I miss it?) and PSCmdLet gets used exclusively all over the chapter without telling the reader why.

Don't get me wrong, this is a wonderful book and honestly, I may come back in a few weeks to update this review and give the book an additional star. But I'm the kind of guy that always needs the `Why` before the `How`.


User review
The definitive guide to PowerShell development
I've been developing PowerShell cmdlets for the past year and half for the PowerShell Community Extensions project. I really wish I had this book when I started. It would have saved me a ton of time. Having everything documented in one place alone would have been a huge timesaver. The examples in the book are really good and should give any would-be developer of PowerShell cmdlets or providers a huge jumpstart. One minor quibble is that the formatting on some of the sample code output wraps making it harder to interpret the results. Other than that it is a fantastic compendium of the knowledge necessary to start knocking off some heavy duty cmdlets and providers.