PowerShell for Beginners: 100 Exercises
PowerShell for Beginners: 100 Exercises,Learn PowerShell through 100 hands-on exercises for real-world IT automation skills.
If you’ve been meaning to learn PowerShell but aren’t sure where to start, this hands-on guide shows you exactly how to build real automation skills—one exercise at a time. Grow from curious beginner to confident scripter with practical, career-ready practice.
Practice Core Concepts, Automate Tasks, and Build Real-World Skills Through Hands-On Scripting
Overview
PowerShell for Beginners: 100 Exercises is a practice-first IT book designed to accelerate your automation journey. This programming guide balances clarity with depth, giving you digestible explanations and step-by-step tasks that map directly to on-the-job needs. It’s the rare technical book that makes complex topics approachable while keeping you focused on real outcomes.
You’ll start with the building blocks—PowerShell cmdlets and syntax, pipeline operations, variables and data types, conditional statements, and loops and iteration. Each exercise reinforces the last, helping you internalize functions and parameters through repetition and immediate feedback. The result is confidence with the shell and fluency in scripting fundamentals.
From there, you’ll move into everyday operations: file and folder manipulation, object handling and formatting, and reporting and data export for stakeholders. You’ll also learn production-grade practices like error handling and logging and script debugging, while becoming comfortable working in both PowerShell ISE and VS Code. Practical prompts ensure you apply what you learn right away.
Finally, you’ll tackle system administration automation scenarios that mirror real environments, including remote management, scheduled tasks, and registry operations. You’ll explore WMI and CIM operations to query and configure systems at scale and pick up Active Directory basics for user, group, and computer management. Whether you’re on Windows, Linux, or macOS, the exercises guide you toward building reliable scripts that deliver results.
Who This Book Is For
- Help desk technicians and junior system administrators who want to automate repetitive tasks, reduce errors, and fast-track their growth into higher-impact roles.
- IT professionals, DevOps newcomers, and developers seeking a clear path to mastering scripts that integrate with infrastructure workflows and CI/CD pipelines.
- Career changers and certification candidates ready to prove real-world capability through guided exercises and portfolio-worthy mini-projects.
Key Lessons and Takeaways
- Master core shell skills—from cmdlets, the pipeline, and variables to functions and control flow—so you can read, write, and refactor scripts with confidence.
- Apply automation to daily operations: manage files at scale, format and export data for reporting, schedule jobs, and perform remote administration safely and repeatably.
- Build production-ready habits with error handling and logging, script debugging techniques, and structured patterns that make your code maintainable and reliable.
Why You’ll Love This Book
This guide emphasizes learning by doing, with 100 carefully sequenced exercises that convert concepts into muscle memory. Clear explanations, bite-sized steps, and real-world scenarios ensure you don’t just understand PowerShell—you can use it to solve meaningful problems at work.
How to Get the Most Out of It
- Follow the chapters in order to build momentum: begin with shell basics, progress through logic and functions, then move into system administration and automation scenarios. Treat each exercise as a building block toward larger solutions.
- Apply each concept to a scenario from your environment—rename files, parse logs, query services, or export reports. Using your own data accelerates learning and reveals how pipeline operations and object handling streamline real tasks.
- Complete the mini-projects at the end of each chapter to consolidate knowledge. Examples include a backup-and-verify script with logging, a scheduled cleanup job, a WMI-driven inventory report, or an AD user onboarding tool with parameters and validation.
Get Your Copy
Ready to turn curiosity into competence and build scripts that save hours every week? Start practicing today and develop automation skills employers trust.
