Microsoft Virtual Academy on PowerShell 3 with Jeffrey Snover Available

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Microsoft Virtual Academy has a course on PowerShell 3 that you just can’t miss. This is part one of a series, so don’t fall behind.  The first course is “Getting Started with PowerShell 3.0 Jump Start” and it’s available now.

Microsoft Virtual Academy Course: Getting Started with PowerShell 3

Getting Started with PowerShell 3.0 is presented by Jason Helmick (@TheJasonHelmick) and Jeffrey Snover (@JSnover), who invented PowerShell.

It’s available now as a free course that you can start watching.

The course includes these modules, and provides almost 6 hours of material:

  1. “Don’t Fear the Shell” (39 minutes)
  2. The Help System (55 minutes)
  3. The pipeline: getting connected & extending the shell (28 minutes)
  4. Objects for the admin (42 minutes)
  5. The pipeline: deeper (43 minutes)
  6. The PowerShell in the shell: Remoting (55 minutes)
  7. Getting prepared for automation (26 minutes)
  8. Automation in scale: Remoting (27 minutes)
  9. Introducing scripting and toolmaking (51 minutes)

I’m going through this training now, and though I have a pretty good handle on PowerShell I can still learn a lot in the little details, and it’s great to hear some of the stories from Jeffrey Snover about how PowerShell came out. Stories like:

  • How the pipeline in PowerShell differs from the pipeline in Unix (in Unix the pipeline only passes text, in PowerShell you pass whole objects, with properties and methods included)
  • How the verb-noun command structure came from VMS.
  • Why commands in PowerShell are called cmdlets (searching for “command” returned millions of results, searching for “cmdlet” returned only thousands, and they were all about PowerShell)
  • Why Unix commands work in PowerShell (it’s all because of their great use of aliases)

If you are so inclined, you can download each of the sessions to browse offline, or you can stream them from MVA.  Microsoft Virtual Academy also has a ton of courses on all kinds of Microsoft products and technologies.  You can also accumulate points and try and beat your friends at achieving some kind of status or something.  I don’t know – I tried that for a while but mostly I just want the content, not the points.

This is definitely share-worthy, so spread the word and help get your friends up to speed on PowerShell 3.