There have been a handful of useful posts recently giving reviews across the spectrum of PowerShell books. I always love reading these posts, as they let you compare and contrast the whole range of quality and approaches. When reading reviews that focus only on a single book, it’s sometimes hard to calibrate – does the reviewer get this excited about blank reams of paper? Slag Shakespeare for his typos?

My favourite is Richard Siddaway’s summary, freshly updated today: http://richardspowershellblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/powershell-booksmarch-2012/. The ecosystem of PowerShell books has really blossomed – I love that there are two books on managing VMWare on this list!

Jonathan Medd also has a good list here: http://www.jonathanmedd.net/2011/01/recommended-powershell-books.html.

A resource I am hopeful about is Don Jones’ recently launched http://www.powershellbooks.com. Its goal is to “help you select the Windows PowerShell book or books that best fit your current learning and reference needs.” Several of Don’s books are in every “PowerShell must have” list. His “Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches” book for beginners is tearing up the charts. Right now, the review site only covers books by Manning Press (plus an additional book that Don wrote), so it’s not an objective survey. I hope he expands his scope to make it one. It also doesn’t actually review the books (it links to product pages), but I’m still crossing my fingers because Don’s touch has a way of turning things into gold :)

The books that tend to get left off these lists are the domain-specific ones: PowerShell + SQL, PowerShell + Exchange, PowerShell + SharePoint. Those ecosystems are becoming robust enough to support a survey of “PowerShell SQL” books, for example, although I’m not aware of any that have done so.

If you know of any good book comparison lists, please let me know!