My Next PowerShell Book

I'm working on a new PowerShell book. The book's title is Windows Server 2016 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook (ISBN: 978-1-78712-204-8).  The focus of the book is showing how to manage key Windows Server 2016 features using the latest versions of PowerShell. For each area covered, I show how to do things using Powershell, in the form of recipes. The intention is to both teach a bit about the feature itself, and show you how to manage the feature using built-in and add-on modules.

In a few cases, there is no built-in way to perform some operation using PowerShell. My favourite example is that the Printing cmdlets provide no way to create a printer pool, but you can in the UI. In that case, and others, the book shows useful Win32 console applications. In the case of printer pools, we show how to use PrintUI.DLL and RunDll32.EXE to set up a printer pool. IT pros can't yet do everything with PowerShell, out of the box - but in many cases, that's just not a problem.

The book has 13 chapters, as follows:

• What’s New in PowerShell
• Implementing NanoServer
• Managing Windows Updates
• Managing Printers
• Managing Server Backup
• Managing Performance
• Troubleshooting Servers
• Managing Windows Network Services
• Managing Network Shares
• Managing IIS
• Managing Hyper-V
• Managing Azure
• Using Desired State Configuration

At the time of this post, I'm nearly done the drafting of the book's contents, and entering into the slow, tedious, and boring part: the editing and final proofing. It may be slow, tedious, and boring, but it's very important, as any writer knows.

There were several hiccoughs with the writing, but it's looking now like this book will be published in the autumn. As soon as I have a more definitive date, I'll post it.

[Later]
Publication should be early October. Sadly, my planned co-author had to drop out of the writing due to personal commitments. Additionally, I had to scale back a bit on the contents. The original plan was to write 450 pages. The book ended up something like 650!