Hello, everyone, and welcome to the next step in your PowerShell journey.
My name is Jeff Hicks.
I've been teaching and writing about PowerShell since the very beginning,
and I'm eager to teach you everything you need to know
about the Help System in PowerShell.
I often say that I don't train people to use PowerShell, I teach them.
Training, to me, implies there's a set way to do something.
You click here, enter value, press okay, move onto the next thing.
But PowerShell isn't like that.
It's a paradigm and a language that, once learned,
lets you do what you need to do.
A major part of learning PowerShell is learning how to
discover and how to teach yourself.
And that's where the PowerShell Help System comes into play.
Now, when I do live classes,
I really push students hard on learning how to use PowerShell Help.
If you don't learn how to use it,
you'll never really use PowerShell more than copying and pasting from
sites like Stack Overflow and then hoping that it works.
So with all of that, let's get to it. Now, believe it or not,
PowerShell is actually easy to learn and use,
but you have to be willing to put in the work up front,
be open minded and be consistent.
At its most essential, using PowerShell follows this model.
First,
find the command or commands that you need to accomplish your
goal. Now as a beginner, you won't completely know how to use the
command properly. Which means you need to discover and use the
built‑in help documentation.
Now, as much as I'd love people to buy the books that I write,
you don't have to read a book before you begin using PowerShell.
You have help and documentation right at your fingertips.
Once you understand the command, obviously the next step is to execute it.
The command could be as simple as restarting the Windows
firewall service on the local host.
Or it could be getting the free drive space on a hundred
servers queried from active directory and then writing that
information to a SQL server database.
You'll eventually learn how to pull all those parts together. But knowing
how to use them is the first and most important step,
and that's why we're here. When you run help for a command
PowerShell gives you everything you need to know.
After reading this help,
you'll have a better idea about how to get a service. Now, no,
don't worry.
I'll teach you how to get the most out of this help, how to interpret it,
although, as you can see, a lot of it is self‑evident, but we will cover this in great detail throughout the rest of the course.