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With all of this in mind,

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let's pull everything together so that you can be on your way using

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PowerShell. If you have any doubt about the help content you are

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reading locally, if there is an online link,

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go online.

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Don't forget that you can update help periodically to refresh your

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local content or search online for other help.

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But as I mentioned a moment ago,

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be very critical and aware with the content that you find.

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And one subtle caveat here is that very often PowerShell

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content is written from a certain perspective.

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Typically, you'll find two camps of PowerShell people, developers and IT pros.

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Each of these groups views and uses PowerShell slightly differently.

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As you can probably guess, I'm in the IT pro camp.

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I teach and write about PowerShell with the idea that an IT pro is going

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to use it for their job managing things from a command prompt or writing

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scripts and functions to be run from a prompt.

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Now, that's not to say that developer related content isn't useful to IT pros,

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because it certainly is,

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but it might take a bit more experience to understand how it

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fits into what you really are trying to do.

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I can't stress enough the importance of being

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critical with help that you find online.

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And don't assume that something that you find in a foreign post written by a

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Microsoft employee is good PowerShell or even correct.

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Back in the early days,

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I saw PowerShell in reform once from a Microsoft employee,

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not someone on the PowerShell team, but it was just not good

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PowerShell and it was actually a little bit wrong.

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This even goes,

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by the way, it's not just Microsoft, this even goes

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through people like myself or other MVPs.

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I dread to think what people might find in terms of

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PowerShell information that I wrote say,

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10 years ago.

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I have learned a lot since those early days and and I've grown more

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with PowerShell and PowerShell has grown up as well.

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Don't be thinking, oh, Jeff wrote that so it must be good.

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No, there is no guarantee.

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There is no guarantee that what you're reading is still valid or it will

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work in your environment with your policies and procedures.

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Remember, keep your help updated.

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If you can't recall when you last updated help, well,

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it's probably time to run updated help.

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A reason that I remind you is that even though commands and

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parameters won't change between versions,

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the about help topics might get updated and you definitely want

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that material. By now, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I'm

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going to give you one more reminder to read PowerShell help,

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including the examples all the time.

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I think you'll find that different parts of the help will stick out

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more based on what you are working on at the time.

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In fact,

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you have to use PowerShell every day, do something, run a command, read

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an about topic. PowerShell is like a foreign language.

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Like any foreign language, the key to fluency is emersion and repetition.

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Reading the help and running examples is an easy,

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no cost way to improve your mastery.

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So that's it for now.

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I hope you found this course helpful.

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Be sure to grab the course downloads and run through the review questions. Until next time, this is Jeff Hicks wishing you happy coding.