June is learn PowerShell month

For the last year or so I’ve been hearing people talking about PoweShell and how great it is.  I’m sure it’s great or a ton of people wouldn’t be talking about it.  My problem is I don’t get it.  I don’t understand why I’d want to use PS instead of just logging into a server.  So for that reason, I want to do a month long dive (I’ll stop short of calling it deep) into PowerShell to see for myself what all the excitement is all about.

For those that use PS I’d really love to hear some real life examples where this has helped you and just that you wanted a different way of doing a given function.  That being said, can anyone provide a starting point for learning PS?  Wish me luck!

Thanks

J.D.

Tagged in: Learning, PowerShell

Comments

[Jeff Truman]

J.D.,
I learned Powershell from necessity. It's true that the mother of invention or the drive to learn new things is driven by pain. I was working for a former employer that was a Software as a service company. We had a large web farm infrastruture that sat behind F5 load balancers. A certain website application went into production and was found to have a very inconsistent bug that would crash the IIS W3SVC service. The only recovery option was to drop the node out of the F5 pool and wait for connections to bleed off and finally bounce IIS. I did this manually for about 2-3 weeks at typically about 3 or 4 am in the morning based on Production Alerts that I would receive on my on call phone. Finally when I just could not take it anymore I started to look at how to automate what I was doing..... HELLO POWERSHELL!
F5 Networks had a Powershell V1 snapin that allowed me to authenticate and drop nodes from pools. I was able to trigger the script off of our Enterprise Event Monitoring software and completely automate the process. It not only allowed me to get more sleep but also increased our uptime metric significantly.

Happy learning and feel free to comment on my blog with any questions.
http://scriptwarrior.wordpress.com

Thanks,
Jeff T.