Time for another book review. This time I will be reviewing Microsoft PowerShell, VBScript and JScript Bible available on amazon.com HERE.
I like the format of this book. Several sections provide code listings in VBScript and JScript to show how to complete various tasks.
All, if not most, of the content was written by James O'Neill. James has a very good blog (http://blogs.technet.com/jamesone/), and wrote an extensive PowerShell library for Hyper-V (http://www.codeplex.com/PSHyperv), so he definitely has some good practical experience with PowerShell.
In the end, I would recommend this book to anyone doing any kind of scripting. I think this is a good book for beginners as it is task-based, and if someone wants to gain experience with any of the scripting languages in this book, this is a good one-stop-shop reference guide.
My challenge for the authors would be to have all the code listing in all 3 scripting languages side-by-side, and, for example, have another section on what PowerShell can do, that the others can't like direct access to managed code.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
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3 comments:
I checked out the TOC and Index online and was disappointed (again) to see yet another book on windows scripting that appears at first glance to not pay any more than lip service to code signing.
The only thing I see in there is some refs to the Script.Signer object. Powershell has a great default setting in Windows that allows only signed scripts to be run. Unfortunately the overwhelming and great majority of all scripting related literature seems to focus on how to turn that off quickly, rather than lay a foundation of knowledge in admins to actually start signing scripts in the average Enterprise Ad environment with a Windows Server CA or even open source CA's.
Would you please make some additional comments on the quality of code signing advice contained in this book?
Great comment!
The reference to Script.Signer is actually in the appendix, and is just 5 lines of showing how to create an object and how to use its methods.
There's about 3 pages in the PowerShell section ("Scripts and Security") that talks about signing. It lays out the "how to sign", but not really the "why you should sign".
I appreciate the feedback, and plan to put it to use on some possible upcoming stuff...
FYI: James O'Neill also wrote all of the PowerShell scripts for the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Resource Kit.
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