Cole McDonald

July 28, 2022 • 11 min read

Learn Powershell in 5 Painless Steps – Decisions (If/Else, Switch, Function) – Step 5

DevOps = Developers + Operations. What if you’re in Operations and don’t have a developer at your disposal? That should never stop you from making your job easier and more efficient. Powershell is a scripting language from Microsoft that is already on your Windows PC and Servers and more recently, open sourced to the OSX and Linux communities. It ships with a great minimalist development environment (Powershell ISE).

The problem I had is that all of the tutorials out there either assume a background in scripting and programming, or act as nothing more than command references. I’m hoping to enable you to automate your own workflows even if you’ve never programmed before. You only need to learn 5 things: Storage, Input, Output, Decisions, Loops. Everything you do manually is made up of these 5 things. Every programming language is made up of these 5 things.

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July 28, 2022 • 13 min read

Learn Powershell in 5 Painless Steps – Loops (Foreach, For, While) – Step 4

DevOps = Developers + Operations. What if you’re in Operations and don’t have a developer at your disposal? That should never stop you from making your job easier and more efficient. Powershell is a scripting language from Microsoft that is already on your Windows PC and Servers and more recently, open sourced to the OSX and Linux communities. It ships with a great minimalist development environment (Powershell ISE).

The problem I had is that all of the tutorials out there either assume a background in scripting and programming, or act as nothing more than command references. I’m hoping to enable you to automate your own workflows even if you’ve never programmed before. You only need to learn 5 things: Storage, Input, Output, Decisions, Loops. Everything you do manually is made up of these 5 things. Every programming language is made up of these 5 things.

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July 28, 2022 • 13 min read

Learn Powershell in 5 Painless Steps – Input (Console, File, Applications) – Step 3

DevOps = Developers + Operations. What if you’re in Operations and don’t have a developer at your disposal? That should never stop you from making your job easier and more efficient. Powershell is a scripting language from Microsoft that is already on your Windows PC and Servers and more recently, open sourced to the OSX and Linux communities. It ships with a great minimalist development environment (Powershell ISE).

The problem I had is that all of the tutorials out there either assume a background in scripting and programming, or act as nothing more than command references. I’m hoping to enable you to automate your own workflows even if you’ve never programmed before. You only need to learn 5 things: Storage, Input, Output, Decisions, Loops. Everything you do manually is made up of these 5 things. Every programming language is made up of these 5 things.

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July 28, 2022 • 13 min read

Learn Powershell in 5 Painless Steps – Output (Console, File, XML/CSV) – Step 2

DevOps = Developers + Operations. What if you’re in Operations and don’t have a developer at your disposal? That should never stop you from making your job easier and more efficient. Powershell is a scripting language from Microsoft that is already on your Windows PC and Servers and more recently, open sourced to the OSX and Linux communities. It ships with a great minimalist development environment (Powershell ISE).

The problem I had is that all of the tutorials out there either assume a background in scripting and programming, or act as nothing more than command references. I’m hoping to enable you to automate your own workflows even if you’ve never programmed before. You only need to learn 5 things: Storage, Input, Output, Decisions, Loops. Everything you do manually is made up of these 5 things. Every programming language is made up of these 5 things.

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July 28, 2022 • 13 min read

Learn Powershell in 5 Painless Steps – Storage (Variables, Arrays, Hashtables) – Step 1

DevOps = Developers + Operations. What if you’re in Operations and don’t have a developer at your disposal? That should never stop you from making your job easier and more efficient. Powershell is a scripting language from Microsoft that is already on your Windows PC and Servers and more recently, open sourced to the OSX and Linux communities. It ships with a great minimalist development environment (Powershell ISE).

The problem I had is that all of the tutorials out there either assume a background in scripting and programming, or act as nothing more than command references. I’m hoping to enable you to automate your own workflows even if you’ve never programmed before. You only need to learn 5 things: Storage, Input, Output, Decisions, Loops. Everything you do manually is made up of these 5 things. Every programming language is made up of these 5 things.

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July 28, 2022 • 3 min read

On to the Future with Powershell

When I started my 5 Painless Steps Powershell learning series. It was a smashing success. I was hoping a few dozen people would find it useful. It was viewed by over 2500 people in the first month. Yikes!

The point of the series was specifically to bring more Ops to devops. Learning to program can be daunting and takes a dedication of time. The thing to realize, in my opinion, is that the 5 steps I presented can be applied and learned in any language. Most of the commands are just slight variations from one to the other as well. For instance, some languages use elseif, others else if. There are 2 trains of thought for the for loop, the (init, test, increment) model Powershell uses and the for/next model ($x = 1 to 100) used in basic.

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