Hello!

Welcome to Sam Learns PowerShell – The Blog! The name is pretty self-explanatory, but on the surface level, this is going to follow my progress through the book “Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, 4th Edition” (Non-sponsored link) by James Petty, Travis Plunk, Tyler Leonhardt, Don Jones, and Jeffery Hicks.

The Backstory: I’m an IT Manager at a mid-sized non-profit school in the NorthEast and part of the reason I got into IT was because of all the compelling opportunities it offered to learn new things. PowerShell is one of those things.

For those not in IT, PowerShell is a function of Windows (also available for Mac and Linux), that is designed for automating certain IT processes. Let’s say, for example, that I need to install a program on 200 computers, and each time I install the program, I have to go through multiple screens where I’m clicking the “Continue” button or selecting specific settings. PowerShell allows me to automate that to the point where all I’m doing is double-clicking on a script, and then the computer does that for me on all 200 computers.

(That said, it is a very powerful tool, so there is also an element of cybersecurity involved. Actually, most of my exposure to PowerShell has come from my experiences studying for the CompTIA Security+ and CySA+ certification exams, because the wrong script, clicked innocently, can do all sorts of damage to a computer, or open it to attack by a bad actor. So it’s also important to avoid running any PowerShell scripts that you don’t understand the code behind)

During my recent studies for the CompTIA CySA+ exam, this book came up over and over again in my research, so I thought I’d give it a try. As the title suggests, it’s meant to make PowerShell accessible and, as the authors put it, “immediately effective” for Administrator audiences to “learn how to run commands,” with the ultimate goal of getting the reader to “use PowerShell and being effective with it in a production environment.”¹ The book was sitting around on my desk for the past six months (stuff came up, as it always does) so I came up with the idea of this blog as a motivator to get through the book, share useful information with my network and others on the internet, and hopefully get some extra discussion around what I’m learning to help it stick.

This blog is not going to recount the book word-for-word but summarize my work as I go through the chapters of the book and my thoughts and experiences with what I’m learning. At the ‘End’ of the book, I’ll also be giving my thoughts on the experience generally. Expect entries roughly once a week, as my lunch breaks and daily life of being a Manager unfortunately sometimes don’t allow me the time or dedicated attention required to get through these chapters every day. While I hope this also is a positive addition to my IT work generally, at the moment, this is a personal project done on my own time at home. In some ways, this is also easier, as some PowerShell tasks may require testing out powerful automation and commands, that I’d rather not run on my work computer in case it takes me a little while to figure out how to revert the changes.

That said, it’s also probably better to avoid impacting my computers at home too much if I can avoid it, so Blog Entry #2 will probably be about setting up a virtual machine 🙂

I will be posting on my LinkedIn every time I make progress and update the blog, and will try to respond to any comments I get here or there when I can.

Thanks for reading and coming along with me on my PowerShell journey!

¹ Plunk, T., Petty, J., Leonhardt, T., Jones, D., & Hicks, J. (2022). Learn powershell in a month of lunches: Covers windows, linux and macos. Manning Publications. 4

Side-Note: I am not thrilled to discover that Citation Machine is ad-supported since the last time I used it, but it is helpful at quickly building citations, so credit where credit is due 🙂