PowerShell Tips to Write By

A Practical Guide to Better PowerShell Scripts 💻

PowerShell Tips to Write By is a compact collection of practical advice for people who already use PowerShell and want their scripts to be cleaner, safer, and easier to maintain. With the subtitle Building better PowerShell scripts one tip at a time, the book focuses on habits and patterns rather than language basics. It is a Leanpub Forever Edition by Adam Bertram and Bryce McDonald.

Instead of walking through PowerShell syntax from the ground up, the book assumes you have some experience with cmdlets, functions, and scripts. It then offers targeted guidance on the decisions that separate a quick one-off command from reliable automation.

What the Book Covers ⚙️

The 60-page guide is organized as a sequence of focused tips. It moves through core scripting decisions such as:

• Reusing community modules instead of reinventing common tools
• Building single-purpose functions that act as reusable building blocks
• Parameterizing scripts, using parameter sets, and validating input
• Handling errors gracefully and knowing when to force terminating errors
• Returning standardized output and using the pipeline effectively
• Writing for cross-platform PowerShell and avoiding Windows-only assumptions
• Learning Pester basics and using infrastructure tests

Other sections address security-minded practices, such as avoiding clear-text secrets, limiting use of Invoke-Expression, and using constrained language mode where appropriate. The advice is aimed at real-world automation, not abstract theory.

Who Will Get the Most From It 🧠

System administrators, DevOps engineers, automation specialists, and developers who write PowerShell regularly will find the tips directly applicable. Beginners can follow the examples, but the book does not teach PowerShell from scratch; it is best suited to readers who already know how to run commands and create basic scripts.

If you collaborate on scripts, maintain automation over time, or need your work to run in mixed environments, the book’s emphasis on readability, predictability, and security is especially relevant.

Why These Tips Matter

Good PowerShell is not just about making something run once. It is about making scripts that colleagues can read, that fail predictably, and that can be safely extended. The tips in this book address those long-term concerns. By treating functions as building blocks, validating input, and standardizing output, you can reduce the kind of fragile automation that becomes harder to support as it grows.

About the Leanpub Forever Edition

This is the Leanpub Forever Edition, published on June 4, 2020. The Forever Edition format is designed to allow periodic updates as the book evolves. Copyright 2019–2020 Adam Bertram.

Better Scripts, One Tip at a Time

If you already work in PowerShell and want to improve the quality of your scripts without wading through a beginner’s language manual, PowerShell Tips to Write By offers a focused set of ideas you can apply to your next function, module, or automation task.