Scripting

Windows PowerShell(TM) Scripting Guide
$49.99
Unlike the previous reviewers, I found this book useful. The book structure is a hybrid meaning it isn't a training guide as to everything you can do with PowerShell. Nor is it a here is every scenario that you can run into in windows administration. It is definitely an introductory book that covers must basics in PowerShell. Then covers a cross sampling of Windows administrations tasks that system administrators need to do. The chapters are broken down by area with a substantial amount of methods to perform administration tasks .The Book gets into some intermediate capabilities like using PowerShell to open excel and building a spreadsheet or writing to a database.
I will agree with one aspect of the comments it would have been nice if in the index he indexed these areas

Scripting Magic

38 scripts for classic tricks 7 interviews on scripting 10 articles on how to use scripting to improve your magic Material contributed by Michael Ammar, Jon Armstrong, Rafael Benatar, Eugene Burger, Michael Close, Bob Farmer, Paul Green, Paul Harris, Eric Henning, Larry Jennings, Mark Joerger, Kenton Knepper, Jonathan Levit, John Lovick, Eric Mead, David Regal, Max Maven, Gary Ouellet, Jim Steinmeyer, Teller, Joe M. Turner

Microsoft��� Windows��� Scripting Self-Paced Learning Guide (Pro-Other)
$44.99
I got this as a freebie ebook when I bought the WMI scripting book.
What a total waste. I am new to Widows scripting but an old hack at *Nix shell scripting and perl. I needed to do some scripting for a client that doesn't have perl installed universally, but wants scripts to run universally on their windows servers.

I wasted a couple of days beating my head against the wall because I used this book. I finally bought "Windows 2000 Scripting Guide" and got my scripts working.

In addition to the complaints others have left indicating the the author does not explain the programming model, I found myself with a large hole in my foot because this author directed me to point a gun at my boot before pulling the trigger.

I used the sample scripts in the book as a starting point in my scripts, but unwittingly injected really bad practices into my programs.

The author states in Chapter 1:
"So 'On Error Resume Next' tells the computer that when something is messed up (causing an error), you want the computer to just skip that line and try the next line in the script. This process is called error handling,"

Actually, this is called ERROR HIDING (not handling) and it causes things that are messed up (causing an error) to be hidden from your view so you CAN'T find or fix them.

This is the worst bad practice that can be taught

Here is an example of how bad it is:
while using this directive your code that looks like:
IF condition THEN
positive_action
ELSE
negative_action
END IF

will, when an error is encountered in evaluating the condition, get transmogrified into simply:

positive_action

The "condition" that includes an error ALWAYS evaluates to true.
I can't think of a worse logic bomb to inject into your code or a better reason to skip this book.

Source Vehicle Scripting
$19.95