PowerShell Gotchas

Learn more about PowerShell by examining some of its most strange behaviors.

PowerShell is the de facto standard for automation and administration on Windows systems. The central design mantra in PowerShell is Think-Type-Get. That is: Think what you want, Type it, and Get the results. Unfortunately this mantra doesn't always work - PowerShell combines concepts from other languages (Perl, Python, and VBScript for example) and borrows ideas from other platforms (like pipelining in Bash). This creates an experience that feels familiar, but fails to behave consistently with our experiences. This creates "gotchas." In this course, we will analyze some specific cases of PowerShell's strange behavior in order to better understand how and why PowerShell works the way it does.