About this Book
Most of what you’ll need to know about this book is covered in chapter 1, but there are a few things that we should mention up front.
First of all, if you plan to follow along with our examples and complete the hands-on exercises, you’ll need a virtual machine or computer running Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012. We cover that in more detail in chapter 1. You can get by with Windows 7, but you’ll miss out on a few of the hands-on labs.
Second, be prepared to read this book from start to finish, covering each chapter in order. Again, this is something we’ll explain in more detail in chapter 1, but the idea is that each chapter introduces a few new things that you will need in subsequent chapters. You shouldn’t try to push through the whole book—stick with the one chapter per day approach. The human brain can only absorb so much information at once, and by taking on PowerShell in small chunks, you’ll learn it a lot faster and more thoroughly.
Third, this book contains a lot of code snippets. Most of them are quite short, so you should be able to type them easily. In fact, we recommend that you do type them, since doing so will help reinforce an essential PowerShell skill: accurate typing! Longer code snippets are given in listings and are available for download at http://Morelunches.com (just click on this book’s cover image and look for the “Downloads” section).