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One of the most important concepts for people to learn and

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embrace is what I call the PowerShell paradigm.

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As I said a moment ago, when you run a command in PowerShell,

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you don't have to parse or manipulate any text output.

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Instead,

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you work with objects. Now don't worry, you don't have to be a developer.

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Eventually you'll realize that this is not that difficult.

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The objects move through a pipeline.

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Each command in your PowerShell expression can do something.

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At the end of the pipeline, PowerShell displays your results.

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And when it comes a scripting, if you can type it at a prompt,

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you can build a script around it.

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There's essentially no difference between the commands you type

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interactively and what you put into a script file.

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The script gives you some flexibility and saves a whole lot of typing.

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Here's a taste of what IT pros used to have to deal with when

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using VBScript, for example. This is about 20 lines of script

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that is not easy to learn or to write. The script has to

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essentially parse the results as text.

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Now all of this script has been saved to a file and

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then executed at a command line.

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The result is some text that shows disk usage. Very useful,

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but it was a lot of work to get to that result. Now compare all of

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that to this one‑line PowerShell command. Even though it looks like a

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long line, technically this is one command.

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There's no scripting needed, you can type it at a prompt.

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And while it may look daunting, especially if you are totally new to PowerShell,

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once you learn more about PowerShell's language and syntax,

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you'll realize that it is actually pretty easy to understand and write. Now,

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if this was something that you wanted to do often, you can create a

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PowerShell script and save yourself from typing, or running it at a

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prompt interactively to get the same results.

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An advantage that I'm not showing is that if I needed to export the

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results to say a CSV file or convert it into JSON,

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I can add on more PowerShell commands.

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You should think of PowerShell as a management engine.

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This engine can be exposed interactively or through

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scripting. PowerShell is more, much, much more, than just a shell or successor to VBScript.