On Friday, Amazon began shipping the PowerShell Cookbook, V3!

You can buy it in both print and digital formats from Amazon, O’Reilly, and any of your other favourite book sellers.

If you or your company subscribes to Safari, it’s there too.

It’s almost 1100 pages now, despite my continuing efforts to keep it svelte :) Since every edition of the book is about filling “missing pieces” from the last, and we filled tons of “missing pieces” from V2, much of the new content directly replaced recipes that existed in the V3 book.

If you want a free eBook of the first chapter, O’Reilly has made it available: “The Windows PowerShell Interactive Shell.”

What’s new in this edition?

My previous post delved into this in tons of detail.

Workflow, being the biggest new addition to PowerShell in version three, represents the largest change to the cookbook in this edition. It gets an entire chapter of coverage – including some great guidance on when to write a workflow, and when not to!

Scheduled tasks get explained in detail, as do web and internet scripting techniques that we’ve now vastly simplified through Invoke-WebRequest, Invoke-RestMethod, and related cmdlets.

PowerShell version three also begins a large shift in the Windows Management world: from WMI to CIM. The Windows Server Blog talks about this shift in great detail, and the PowerShell Cookbook has been completely updated to incorporate this change.

And of course there’s the “little stuff”. The vast sea of changes we made to improve your life little-by-little: default parameters, customizing the updated tab expansion engine, mapping drives, creating restricted remoting endpoints with configuration files, updating help, working with alternate data streams – the list seemingly goes on forever.

If you liked the first or second versions of the PowerShell Cookbook, you’ll like this one even more :)