Chapter 1. Before you begin
Windows PowerShell is an interesting product. It’s one of the few Microsoft products that were explicitly designed for several different audiences. Within those audiences will be beginners, intermediate users, and experts, but in many cases there’s little crossover between the audience categories. Folks who use the shell as a command-line interface—tool users, in our terminology—aren’t always interested in approaching the shell in any other way. Folks who use the shell to create tools—toolmakers, as we would call them—might use the shell as a development tool most of the time and only rarely use PowerShell as an interactive command-line interface. This book is for people—primarily administrators—who are getting started in that second, toolmaking audience.