I’ve had the book PowerShell Deep Dives laying around since August 2013. I had read some parts of it because I follow many of the great PowerShell community members that contributed to it. But I hadn’t gotten to reading it completely yet until now.
The title of the book includes “deep dives” implies very deep technical content and I can assure you, this type of content is present in the book. some of the stuff I still need to wrap my head around to understand properly. On the other hand, other parts of the book are more simplistic which you might not expect from a deep dives book.
The book covers a very broad number of topics and technologies. What I liked is that the articles were written by professionals and community members that are specialized in or are very knowledgeable about this specific topic/technology.
As a result of having the broad number of topics and technologies, not all parts of the book might be relevant to you (especially as a deep dive). I found myself skimming over some parts later in the book since it is very unlikely it is or will become useful for me. This will differ from person to person though, so take a good look at the topics being covered in the table at the end of the article.
All in all it was a good read and I think I’ll use the book mainly as a reference for those times that I need the deep dive insights. The book can be ordered from by example Manning.com and all royalties go to charity: Save the Children
| Part 1 PowerShell administration |
| 1 Diagnosing and troubleshooting PowerShell remoting (Don Jones) |
| 2 CIM sessions (Richard Siddaway) |
| 3 Collecting and analyzing performance counter data (Arnaud Petitjean) |
| 4 TCP port communications with PowerShell (Boe Prox) |
| 5 Managing systems through a keyhole (Bartosz Bielawski) |
| 6 Using PowerShell to audit user logon events (Mike F. Robbins) |
| 7 Managing and administering a certification authority database with PowerShell (Cadims Podans) |
| 8 Using PowerShell to reduce Active Directory token bloat (Ashley McGlone) |
| Part 2 PowerShell scripting |
| 9 The 10 PowerShell scripting commandments (James O’Neill) |
| 10 Avoiding the pipeline (Jeff Wouters) |
| 11 A template for handling and reporting errors (Will Steele) |
| 12 Tips and tricks for creating complex or advanced HTML reports with PowerShell (Jonathan Medd) |
| 13 Using and “abusing” dynamic parameters (Bartosz Bielawski) |
| 14 PowerShell type formatting (Adam Driscoll) |
| 15 Scalable scripting for large data sets: pipeline and database techniques (Matthew Reynolds) |
| 16 Building your own WMI-based cmdlets (Richard Siddaway) |
| 17 Turning command-line tools into PowerShell tools (Jefferey Hicks) |
| Part 3 PowerShell for developers |
| 18 Using Source Control Software with PowerShell (Trevor Sullivan) |
| 19 Inline .NET code (Richard Siddaway) |
| 20 PowerShell and XML: better together (Josh Gavant) |
| 21 Adding automatic remoting to advanced functions and cmdlets (Karl Prosser) |
| 22 Taming software builds (and other complicated processes) with psake (Jim Cristopher) |
| Part 4 PowerShell platforms |
| 23 PowerShell and the SQL Server provider (Ben Miller) |
| 24 Creating flexible subscriptions in SSRS (Donabel Santos) |
| 25 Inventory database table statistics using PowerShell and SQL Server Management Objects (Robert C. Cain) |
| 26 WSUS and PowerShell (Boe Prox) |
| 27 Provisioning IIS web servers and sites with PowerShell (Jason Helmick) |
| 28 Active Directory Group Management application (Chris Bellee) |
