Hi guys,
I have been tasked with delivering an internal 1 day (2 x 3 hours or so) “Getting started with PowerShell” training session, and am looking for input and resources.
Does anybody have something to share about key content, order of delivery, topics I can expect to get through in one day (considering that the audience is expected to be beginners) etc.
Any input and/or resources you can share, will be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
Christian
I need to do something like this too.
I think if you look at the outline for “Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches” you’ll find it’s a pretty good sequence for topics.
yup I have your both of your books I’m 4 weeks into PowerShell now and I’m hooked 
Wow I cant believe the real Don Jones is here… This awesome!!! I tell all my coworkers to get your books of course they cant use mine because the pages are so marked up by me and they have little page tags hanging off nearly every page. Thank you so much for your contribution to the community.
@Rob: I was thinking something along those lines as well.
@Don: That is indeed a good book and outline. However squeezing all of that into a compressed 1-day session, will be quite the challenge 
Thank you both for taking the time to reply to this thread.
I’ve gone the “try to teach them in a few short hours” route, it was quite hit or miss. What’s important enough to include? Will you leave 1/2 the audience in the dust if you try to fit it all in? Will you scare anyone away? How effective will a single presentation / lecture be?
I like the ideas mentioned in this post
Nowadays, if a similar request for a few hours of training comes up, I might try to keep it informal. For example:
Part of it might just be me, but it seems teaching PowerShell in a few hours would be a very, very tough challenge : )
Whichever route you go, these are usually fun, and even if you only convert a few folks over, it’s awesome to see your co-workers start realizing the power behind this, dive into it, and become advocates themselves.
Cheers!
One of the key points that made PowerShell “click” for me when learning was realizing that a majority of the time you are dealing with objects as opposed to dealing with text like you would in another environment like Bash.
Case in point, if I run ps on a Unix box to tell me what processes are running, what does this return in the strict sense? It returns text that is output to standard out. If I want to interact with this output somehow, I would need to interact with it as text (sed and awk to tokenize different “columns”, pretty heavy use of regular expressions, etc)
Now if I run ps on PowerShell (alias for Get-Process), I get an array of Process objects back (of type System.Diagnostics.Process) which allows me to interact with these Process objects using any of the methods or properties available to objects of that type- It just happens to be the case that PowerShell is intelligent enough to output these objects to standard out in a way that makes them readable.
@Warren: I read the same post on Windows IT Pro a while back, and inspiration from that, is actually part of the reason I am now asked to do this 1-day session, as a starting point for an ongoing initiative with an internal user group/forum type setup, with monthly meetups etc… Thank you for sharing your own experiences, I will definately take your advice into consideration.
@Vasken: Yeah … objects will obviously be a key part of it.
Thank you both for sharing
If, by the end of the day, they are not thoroughly familiar with Get-Help and Get-Member, you have failed.