With all of this in mind,
let's pull everything together so that you can be on your way using
PowerShell. If you have any doubt about the help content you are
reading locally, if there is an online link,
go online.
Don't forget that you can update help periodically to refresh your
local content or search online for other help.
But as I mentioned a moment ago,
be very critical and aware with the content that you find.
And one subtle caveat here is that very often PowerShell
content is written from a certain perspective.
Typically, you'll find two camps of PowerShell people, developers and IT pros.
Each of these groups views and uses PowerShell slightly differently.
As you can probably guess, I'm in the IT pro camp.
I teach and write about PowerShell with the idea that an IT pro is going
to use it for their job managing things from a command prompt or writing
scripts and functions to be run from a prompt.
Now, that's not to say that developer related content isn't useful to IT pros,
because it certainly is,
but it might take a bit more experience to understand how it
fits into what you really are trying to do.
I can't stress enough the importance of being
critical with help that you find online.
And don't assume that something that you find in a foreign post written by a
Microsoft employee is good PowerShell or even correct.
Back in the early days,
I saw PowerShell in reform once from a Microsoft employee,
not someone on the PowerShell team, but it was just not good
PowerShell and it was actually a little bit wrong.
This even goes,
by the way, it's not just Microsoft, this even goes
through people like myself or other MVPs.
I dread to think what people might find in terms of
PowerShell information that I wrote say,
10 years ago.
I have learned a lot since those early days and and I've grown more
with PowerShell and PowerShell has grown up as well.
Don't be thinking, oh, Jeff wrote that so it must be good.
No, there is no guarantee.
There is no guarantee that what you're reading is still valid or it will
work in your environment with your policies and procedures.
Remember, keep your help updated.
If you can't recall when you last updated help, well,
it's probably time to run updated help.
A reason that I remind you is that even though commands and
parameters won't change between versions,
the about help topics might get updated and you definitely want
that material. By now, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I'm
going to give you one more reminder to read PowerShell help,
including the examples all the time.
I think you'll find that different parts of the help will stick out
more based on what you are working on at the time.
In fact,
you have to use PowerShell every day, do something, run a command, read
an about topic. PowerShell is like a foreign language.
Like any foreign language, the key to fluency is emersion and repetition.
Reading the help and running examples is an easy,
no cost way to improve your mastery.
So that's it for now.
I hope you found this course helpful.
Be sure to grab the course downloads and run through the review questions. Until next time, this is Jeff Hicks wishing you happy coding.