Well, it’s been a wild ride since the first edition of this book was released. At that
time, PowerShell had just shipped and had a fairly limited scope of influence. Things
have changed a lot. PowerShell now ships in the box with Windows (at least Windows
7 and Server 2008 R2). The number of PowerShell users is now in the hundreds
of thousands, if not millions (this is not a formal estimate—I just looked at some of
the download counters for PowerShell-related tools and went from there).
One of the biggest events from my perspective was the release of PowerShell version
2 in July of 2009. Obviously it was time for a sequel to the book. I put together a short
proposal and estimate of the amount of work needed to update the book. The initial
estimate was for a few months of work—a couple of new chapters, a few updates here
and there, and we’re good to go. Wow, was I ever wrong about that! PowerShell v2
was a really big release.
When you are in the middle of something, working heads down, you tend to lose
perspective of the overall project—that old forest/trees problem. It wasn’t until I was
preparing a talk for MMS (Microsoft Management Summit) that I realized just how
BIG it was. In a one-hour talk, we barely had time to list all of the new stuff, much
less describe it in detail. But describing it in detail was exactly what I needed to do and
that’s why this book took a great deal longer to write than anticipated. It’s also much
bigger than I had expected or wanted. At one point it was double the size of the first
edition. So we cut some stuff that was no longer as relevant with PowerShell v2, moved
some stuff into the online appendixes, and capped the book at about 1000 pages.
