Bruce Payette, one of the original designers of PowerShell, visited us in Charlotte this week.  One slide in his PowerPoint deck showed a stack of PowerShell books as long as my arm.  However, the only book I’ve seen so far that covers the features of PowerShell 2.0 (which will be released when Windows 7 ships) is the Windows PowerShell 2.0 Administrator’s Pocket Consultant, by William R. Stanek.  (Microsoft Press, 2009, 462 pp).  While the book is certainly pocket-sized if you are a system administrator (-eq “wearing cargo pants”), it is much thicker than most pocket guides.  The book gives a good discussion of some of the most exciting features of 2.0, including the integrated debugging environment ise (which you can run in Windows 7 just by typing “powershell_ise” at the command prompt).   It also has a fairly complete discussion of how WinRM allows the administrator to invoke scripts on other machines (provided the appropriate execution policy has been set previously on those machines). 

There are a few minor issues.  The output of scripts is shown in black boxes, which can be hard to read.  Perhaps the most serious lack, however, is information about the ActiveDirectory cmdlets (beyond a mention on page 79), which allow you to query the Active Directory, provision users, and so forth.  Given that these cmdlets require Windows Server 2008 Release 2, however, I can understand why many administrators might not have a reason to know about them yet; however, this nicely-bound book I believe will hold up until your legacy servers have been retired. 

If you have never programmed before at all, this is NOT the book for you.  If you are currently solving problems with the scripting host in your environment, however, it contains enough material to help you make the transition to object oriented scripting.