PowerShell Fundamentals

PowerShell Fundamentals: A Practical Foundation for Real Scripting Work 💻

PowerShell is one of those tools that rewards a solid grounding. You can copy commands from a blog post, but understanding why a pipeline behaves the way it does—or how objects move between commands—changes what you can build. PowerShell Fundamentals by Chris Dent gives that grounding. It is written for readers who want to move from isolated commands to a confident, structured way of working in PowerShell.

Published by Packt in 2026, this 318-page guide pairs the language’s core building blocks with the practical habits that make scripts easier to read, debug, and extend. The subtitle sets the scope clearly: commands, modules, data, objects, operators, and control flow.

Start with the Shell Itself

The opening chapters set up a working environment and show how to get help without leaving the console. Installation, execution policy, the command line, and updatable help are covered alongside command discovery: verbs, nouns, aliases, parameters, parameter sets, and the common parameters that appear again and again. There is also attention to Confirm, WhatIf, Force, and PassThru—the switches that shape how commands behave in real administrative work.

Modules and Reusable Tools ⚙️

Modules are where PowerShell projects start to scale. The book introduces Get-Module, Import-Module, and Remove-Module, then explains PSModulePath and the realities of using Windows PowerShell modules in PowerShell 7. It also looks at the PowerShell Gallery, PSResourceGet, and commands such as Find-PSResource, Install-PSResource, Update-PSResource, Save-PSResource, and Uninstall-PSResource.

Variables, Arrays, and Hashtables

Data handling gets a thorough treatment: creating and naming variables, type conversion, value and reference types, scopes, and the commands that manage variables. Arrays and hashtables are covered from first principles—creation, selection, modification, removal, multi-dimensional and jagged arrays—so readers can choose the right structure instead of forcing everything through a list.

Objects, Operators, and Control Flow 🧠

PowerShell’s object pipeline is central to the book’s approach. Chapters on objects and the pipeline explain streams, Get-Member, properties and methods, PSCustomObject, Add-Member, and the commands that filter, select, sort, group, and measure data. Operators, precedence, grouping, and sub-expressions are also unpacked, giving readers a clearer mental model for writing expressions that do what they intend.

Who This Book Is For

If you are new to PowerShell, this is a structured way to build real foundations rather than memorise snippets. If you already use PowerShell occasionally, the material can fill gaps around modules, objects, and parameter behaviour. It is a practical reference for developers, system administrators, and automation-minded readers who want their scripts to be more deliberate and maintainable.

A Foundation You Can Build On

Chris Dent has been working with PowerShell since 2007 and is active in the PowerShell community, and that practitioner’s perspective comes through in the book’s focus on commands, modules, and objects as connected parts of one language. PowerShell Fundamentals does not promise magic. It offers the groundwork that makes the next script—and the one after that—easier to write. 📚