Windows PowerShell: TFM [Illustrated] [Paperback]

A horrible, horrible book.

I'm rushed for time right now, but I wanted to write at least a short review to warn people away from this turkey. I'm returning my copy for a refund, and will get Bruce Payette's book instead.

This book was clearly rushed to print. Material (including at least one mutliple-page section) is repeated; clearly they haven't finished editing the thing. Tables are sloppily formatted, making it difficult to read. Again, they haven't finished the editing process.

The book can't make up its mind what its target audience is. They use the term WMI without defining it (sure, sysadmins will probably know it, and they do define it many pages later), but then they don't define the term "variable" until roughly page 100.

The book is poorly laid out. It certainly doesn't do what I consider a reasonable job of progressing clearly from point A to point B in trying to define the language. I'm left with the feeling that it's jumping all over the place, trying to combine conveying the lanugage, while providing good example. Suffice it to say, it fails.

I also found their description of the pipeline (arguably the heart of Powershell) to be superficial.

The examples. Don't get me started. If you're looking for a practical guide to what sysadmins need, then look somewhere else. The examples aren't particularly sophisticated, nor do they particularly point out subtle but useful points in the language. Also, they make rookie mistakes. In general you should never use the same values in an example, in case there's some confusion. But no. For example, in describing hash tables, they use strings both for the key and for the value. But this leads to a bug. One of their examples is wrong. The code works only because they use the same data type. If they'd used, say, a string key and an int value, the code would have broken.

The book is padded with useless information. The last, oh, 20% is a listing of all the cmdlets, along with their parameters. But all they do is list the parameters. No hint of what they mean, other than the possibly mnemonic names. Again, the book was clearly rushed into production. A table with even a single sentence on each parameter would have been useful. As it stands, it just makes the book longer, heavier and (presumably, just from a page count POV) more expensive.

Sapien press has made a huge error allowing this piece of crap to be published. It's going to be a long time before I consider buying anything published by them again.

I rated this book at one star. I apologize for misleading you, but Amazon doesn't allow a negative number of stars.

Finally, calling this "TFM" -- well, I tried coming up with things like "The Foney Manual", but in this case, in my mind, TFM means just what it traditionally means. And I'm sure everyone knows what that is.

Overall, I'm glad to have read this book. It isn't without it's problems, however, so let me get those out of the way first:

- The typesetting is poor. This definitely seems like a low-budget self-published book. Poor layout -- look for the proliferation of "example:" being followed by nearly a half page of whitespace. There are no chapter indications on the page headers, making it harder to find chapters without tediously looking for the page number on the Table of Contents.

- The binding seems like it might give out on me. So far it has held up, but I have the feeling that pages are going to start breaking out and flying off.

- Editing? What editing? One chapter stops short only to be tagged on at the end of a following chapter. There's other signs of self-editing mishaps, typos, etc.

- 149 pages of documentation which is no more useful than PowerShell's own help files. Or if you want gui documentation, PowerShell Analyzer has contextual help or you can use Sapien's PowerShell Help gui.

- Retails for $49.99. That's pretty steep for the quantity of material and the production quality. Other PowerShell books may retail for near that price-point, but Amazon is able to offer a discount to their customers.

- Finally, Mr. Jones likes to plug PrimalScript whenever possible. He mentions it from time to time in the book and in the webcasts he does for Microsoft. It's a fine product, though not my choice. (I prefer jEdit, gvim or emacs whenever possible; Karl Prosser's PowerShell Analyzer is great when working at depth specifically with PowerShell.)

But what about the content?

I found TFM to be very accessible. This book got me up and running with Powershell, and it did it without boring me with mind numbing hand-holding or putting me to sleep with over-my-head theory. Probably like a lot of other admin/support staff folks, I am not a programmer and don't have fluency in any particular language, though I *have* been exposed to the basics of a lot of different scripting languages and can put a script together from time to time. For my needs TFM hit the right balance as an introduction. I'm nearly finished with it, and will continue with Payette's book, which goes into greater detail. They're complimentary books, really.

Overall, I do appreciate this book. The production qualities need improving, but that doesn't derail the book from it's purpose. It serves as a good introduction to PowerShell aimed at the sysadmin crew.

UPDATE (20070320): I'm 168 pages into Bruce Payette's Windows PowerShell In Action and have to admit that it is a much more useful and successful book. It goes into significantly more detail about the hows and whys of PowerShell, and looks to be a book that I'll come back to again and again. I can't say the same about TFM, unfortunately. But it got me going, and for that I'll applaud it.

First of all, having all the built-in documentation that comes with Powershell taking up the last 100 pages of the book is was basically useless. It just takes up valuable space on my bookshelf.

I have used the book a basic reference from time to time and it gives me the quick and dirty answer on how to do the basic stuff.

To really dig in deep I would suggest Bruce Payette's book, Powershell in Action. Who better to write a book than the author of the language itself!