xix
acknowledgments
This book is for my wife, Tina. It literally wouldn’t exist without her patience, support, and
encouragement. She kept me fed, sane, and she even read early drafts of material about which she
knows nothing. Now that’s support! She also contributed the Gnome picture in chapter 13 and
the bird-watching information and pictures in chapter 2.
Thanks to my parents for their love and support over the years. Yes, I am finally done with
the book.
Of course there wouldn’t be a PowerShell book without a PowerShell product in the first place,
and PowerShell wouldn’t exist without the vision of its chief architect, Jeffrey Snover. Special
thanks to Jeffrey for reviewing the mansucript and for agreeing to write the foreword to the book.
Another other major contributor was Jim Truher, my co-conspirator in the PowerShell lan-
guage design. Yes, it’s our fault.
I’d like to thank the rest of PowerShell language team: George Xie, Marcel Ortiz Soto (test-
dude extraordinaire), and Wei Wu, all of whom contributed enormously to the project. Kaushik
Pushpavanam, one of the original PowerShell team members, gets major props for introducing
a unit test framework into the PowerShell development process early and then getting the devel-
opers to use it and write tests. This gave us the freedom and agility to listen to customers and
incorporate changes throughout the development process. Thanks to Hilal Al-Hilali for knowing
how to ship; he’s a mean man with a theme. Thanks to Charlie Chase for winning. PowerShell
team members Arul Kumaravel and Abhishek Agrawal contributed significantly to the
COM and
WMI examples in chapter 12. (Arul wrote the COM support, so who could have been better?)
Thanks also to all of the reviewers of the manuscript in its many stages of development: Jeffrey
Copeland, Arul Kumaravel, Rene Gobeyn, Jeffrey Snover, Steve Simmons, Keith Hill, Oliver
Sturm, Thomas Restrepro, Anil Radhakrishna, Alex K. Angelopoulos, David McMahon, Curt
Christianson, Anderson Patricio, Jon Skeet, and Robert. W. Anderson. A special thanks to Alex
Angelopolous who did the final technical review of the book. I’d also like to thank all of the par-
ticipants in the Manning Early Access Program. You guys rock! Much appreciation to everyone
at Manning, starting with my publisher Marjan Bace, my editor Michael Stephens, my develop-
ment editors Betsey Henkels and Jackie Carter, and all the production staff for their hard work
and patience with a new author.
Finally, I want to thank my friend and mentor David Tillbrook for never being satisfied with
the merely adequate. He has a lot to teach us all.