Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches

By: Donald W. Jones, Jeffrey Hicks

Narrated by: Lou Fernandez

Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, third edition, is an innovative tutorial designed for busy IT professionals. Just set aside one hour a day - lunchtime would be perfect - for a month, and you'll be automating Windows tasks faster than you ever thought possible. This updated edition covers PowerShell features that run on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and later, and PowerShell v3 and later, and includes v5 features like PowerShellGet.

What's inside:

• Learn PowerShell from the beginning, no experience required!
• Covers PowerShell v3 and up, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2 and later
• Each lesson takes you an hour or less

About the listener:

Experience with Windows administration is helpful. No programming or scripting experience needed.

About the authors:

Veteran PowerShell MVPs Don Jones and Jeffery Hicks bring years as successful trainers to this concise, easy-to-follow book.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2016 Manning Publications (P)2019 Manning Publications

Well structured

I like the ability to affect network admin without the use or access to active directories I can’t wait to read the next book learn power shell to making in a month of lunches

Use text-to-speech instead.

While the book itself (together with "Learn PowerShell Scripting in a Month of Lunches") is arguably the gold standard in PowerShell, this version of it is basically unusable: the performer's choices are distracting, and content from the printed book is missing.

The narrator's performance is utterly distracting. His prosody is a combination of "announcer reading ad copy" and "parent performing a children's book". Much of the time, the performer gives equally huge emphasis to every word of his sentences, or he gives certain words weirdly inappropriate emphasis: it is a weirdly mocking tone. The performer also occasionally mispronounces technical jargon that is common in this domain. and his rate of speech is a bit rushed in comparison to that of the narrators of similar books. As early as the introduction, the narrator unaccountably repeats some sentences (this does not occur in the printed version). All of this distracts to the point that learning is unlikely if not impossible.

Another problem is the editing of the material for audio presentation. Naturally, technical books such as this one do not lend themselves well to audio presentation, as it includes frequent examples of code that are difficult to read verbatim without sacrificing clarity, flow, and/or engagement. That issue could be mitigated in several ways, but the approach in this rendition of the book is arguably the worst:
* Code is usually skipped altogether, with no overt indication that something was skipped.
* Code is skipped in a haphazard fashion. For example, In section 4.9.2, the narrator skips the code following "The following are correct:" but he reads the code following "But these examples are all incorrect:".
* The downloadable PDF does not present all of the code examples that is skipped in the narration. For example, the PDF is missing the code that the narrator skips in section 4.9.2.

I am dismayed that Manning and/or Audible elected to release an audio version of such poor quality for a book whose printed version is so excellent. I had been hoping to use this book to refresh the knowledge I had gleaned from the printed book in the past, but this audiobook is useless. If you want this book in audio, you would genuinely be better served purchasing the eBook version from Manning.com and running it through a text-to-speech app.