How to teach yourself PowerShell using ISE

There is no reason to be afraid of PowerShell. I know a lot of IT generalists out there have avoided learning it, or, when they do run into a situation where it is required (since not everything is exposed to the GUI interfaces these days), they steal a snippet from the Internet. Well, that’s all well and good, and honestly I still refer to TechNet & blog articles, too. But just leaning on snippets stolen from outside sources is going to leave you poor in real knowledge.

Do you want to know my all time favorite way of learning POSH? You can actually teach yourself using native tools in Windows. Since 2012, we have had the gift of Windows PowerShell ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment). This fantastic scripting tool has pretty much everything you need to build your own serious knowledgebase of fun! In the forthcoming series, we will look at some trivial and non-trivial examples of how this works in practice.

Once you start getting good with this tool, you’ll soon realize its enormous time-saving benefits. In my line of work, since I repeat a lot of basic tasks frequently, I have been able to leverage the Power of the Shell to reduce hours upon hours of menial but time-consuming tasks into something simple that takes just seconds to prep and run.

My boss thinks I am hard at work. In reality, I’m hardly working–more likely I’m enjoying a tea while I prepare a new blog article, or doing something else I enjoy more than setting up yet another (fill in the blank).

So I hope you take my advice and get to work with ISE. Pull it out the next time you have to do something–anything–on your Windows network. See if you can figure out how to do it using PowerShell, and don’t cheat by going online–give yourself time to play with it! We will work through a few examples together soon–stay tuned!