To get the most out of this book

• Some familiarity with operating systems would be beneficial
• Visual Studio Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/) is used a few times in the book and is a useful tool to have available throughout

Download the example code files

The code bundle for the book is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-Windows-PowerShell-Scripting-Fourth-Edition. We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781800206540_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are several text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in the text, type names, property names, property values, variable names, folder names, and file names. For example: "By default, Save-Help (and Update-Help) will not download help content more often than once every 24 hours."

A block of code is set as follows:

Get-Process |
    Select-Object Name, ID -First 1

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are highlighted:

Get-Process |
    Select-Object Name, ID

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

PS> Get-Process |
>>     Select-Object Name, ID -First 1
Name      Id
----      --
Pwsh    5068

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, also appear in the text like this. For example: "Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a plain text format that is used to store structured data."

Warnings or important notes appear like this.