Update 1/22/2013: The much expanded third edition is now available.

On Friday, we wrapped up the final details of the PowerShell Cookbook, V2. O’Reilly has already made the electronic edition available, which is a great resource for searching, copying, pasting, and working with the content in its native form. If you or your company subscribes to Safari, it should be available shortly.

If you’re a fan of the printed version, it’s off to the printers now, and has a scheduled “in-stock” date of 8/24: the date when it’ll be in boxes in the shipping / receiving area of book stores. It takes about a week for books to migrate onto shelves, so the official “when can I get it” date is 8/31.

It’s almost 900 pages now, despite my best efforts to keep it svelte :) I dropped the chapters on Exchange and MOM (since there are dedicated books and support materials for those now), and dropped a few appendixes that are now covered much more effectively in the in-box help. Since much of the V1 book is about filling “missing pieces” from V1, and we filled tons of “missing pieces” from V1, much of the new content directly replaced recipes that existed in the V1 book.

Dropping the chapters on Exchange and MOM was also done in response to feedback. While they provided cursory coverage of the technologies, they were intended primarily to introduce Admins to the wider PowerShell ecosystem. Now that there are entire books written to cover PowerShell-based products (i.e.: VMWare, Exchange, MOM, etc), the Cookbook can now focus on the core technology. Aside from the Exchange / MOM updates, the “Description” sections of many recipes have been beefed up in response to feedback. Most go into significantly more detail, or discuss more of the underpinnings of the recipe or what it covers.

And then, of course, there’s the “new stuff”. The book now has about 430 recipes, almost double what the first version had. It’s sometimes easy to forget how transformative PowerShell V2 is, but it consisted of over two thousand source code checkins!

All-told, the second edition took about 560 hours. That’s a lot, but what surprised me is that it ended up being only about an hour per print-ready page: including research, drafts, reviews, copy editing, and everything else wrapped in the project.

If you liked the first version of the PowerShell Cookbook, you’ll like this version even more :)