Microsoft Windows offer two command shells, Command Prompt shell, and PowerShell. Both the shells are used to communicate with the operating system or the application for automating some IT operations. Windows Power Shell and Windows command prompt, they are both the same idea, but PowerShell is just more advanced. With PowerShell, there are a lot of advantages actually, and it is way more powerful than the command prompt. PowerShell can run commands called cmdlets which are used to extend the capabilities of the command prompt shell.
PowerShell is able to do pretty much everything the command prompt can do, it can run pretty much all the same exact commands that you are used to in the command prompt, but it can do more. You need to know that PowerShell does not just refer to the PowerShell program that you run in windows, it actually refers to an actual entire scripting programming language also called PowerShell, whereas the command prompt pretty much just exists as a legacy environment for old dos commands for backward compatibility.
In this article, I will talk about the best online courses for PowerShell. But before that, let me give an introduction to PowerShell.
What is PowerShell?
Windows PowerShell is an open-source, cross-platform framework developed by Microsoft to automate tasks. It is a combination of a command-line shell and scripting programming language. It is built on top of the .NET framework and is used to administer applications and operating systems. It is majorly used with Windows OS, but it is also compatible with Linux and macOS.
CMDLETS are the commands which you run can run on the PowerShell to automate/execute a task. These commands have more advanced functions created by Microsoft and then put natively into PowerShell. And how you actually work with these commands in PowerShell is a lot easier and different than in command prompt, and that’s because PowerShell uses pipes to pipe data from one command into the other. With PowerShell, you can take the output from one command and pipe it directly into the input of another command. Instead of PowerShell getting outputs in the form of a string, you have to basically parse out and get the exact output PowerShell actually can output results in an object.
PowerShell is very easy to implement and learn. It provides a lot of object-oriented features to automate multiple administrative tasks. System administrators, especially those working on Windows OS, love PowerShell. In PowerShell, you can run jobs in the background on a local or remote machine. All the scripts you write in PowerShell are reusable, so you need to write the script once, and you can use that script multiple times in PowerShell. Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) in PowerShell allows you to do file transfer smoothly.
Now that you are familiar with the fundamentals of PowerShell, let me tell you the best online courses to learn PowerShell.
Best Online Courses for PowerShell
Udemy and Pluralsight are two very popular platforms where you can find a course on all the technologies. These platforms cater to the learning requirement of millions of learners across the globe. The charges of the courses on these platforms are minimal and easily affordable even by students. On these platforms, multiple world-renowned industry veterans have created the courses from their industry experience.
So, here is a list of courses that will help you master PowerShell concepts:
Learning Windows PowerShell
This is the best PowerShell course available on the Udemy platform, which is created by the Infinite Skills team. Over 28616 students have gone through this course, and it has 4.4 stars with a total of 5721 ratings. This course is available in multiple languages: English, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and Thai. The creator of this course, Infinite Skills, is an organization from Canada which is very popular for creating high-quality e-learning content on Udemy. They have almost 300+ courses on Udemy and have trained more than 1.2 million students across the globe.
In this course, you get 5 hours of on-demand video,1 article, 1 downloadable resource. All the files used in the video lectures are also available to follow with the author across the course. You get full lifetime access to this course when you purchase it, so you can go through the course as many times as you like. The course teaches you how to use the command-line shell and scripting language to perform different tasks built on the .NET framework. This course is ideal for beginners, which means no prior experience with Windows PowerShell is required before going through this course. It is designed especially for systems administration.
The course starts with the basics of PowerShell, then jumps into installing and setting up PowerShell. After that, you will learn about the PowerShell commands, including get-command, objects, and classes, get-help. You will also learn about PowerShell scripts and providers, such as the file system provider, alias provider, and environment provider. These lectures in this PowerShell course will also cover working with files and folders, system administration, and PowerShell version 5. After completing this course, you will be able to perform all the administrative tasks on Windows PowerShell comfortably.
Introduction to Windows PowerShell 5.1
This introductory course on Udemy platform is created by Paul Hill and Robert Hill. Over 19902 students have bought this course to learn PowerShell, this course has 4.4 stars with 4282 ratings. This course is available in English, French, and Italian languages. Paul has over 12 years of IT experience as a network administrator, and he has taught over 129k students on Udemy in the past 5 years. Robert has over 28 years of IT experience, and he has worked on multiple military projects as an IT Engineering Technologist.
You get 7 hours of on-demand video in this course, 10 articles, 31 downloadable resources, and full lifetime access to the complete course. This PowerShell course will provide you a solid foundation of Windows PowerShell 5.1. In the beginning, the course teaches you the fundamentals of PowerShell, and by the end of the course, you will know how to create automated scripts to perform some complex tasks. You will learn how to install and update PowerShell, how to use a command line interface, how to use an intelligent scripting environment (ISE), how you can get help and find commands within the CLI. This course will teach you Command Syntax, Objects and Properties, and the Pipeline of PowerShell language. You will also get exposure to some advanced concepts such as active directory domain administration on PowerShell, how to setup your own PowerShell on-premises IT Lab, how to work with desired state configuration, and much more. This course is ideal for beginners who want to start from scratch or even for experienced professionals who would like to brush up on the concepts of PowerShell.
Master Microsoft PowerShell
This is one of the bestseller courses on Udemy on PowerShell created by Tom Meservy. Tom is an information systems professor and founder of Tech Mountain Consulting, which produces high-quality e-learning courses and software development consultations. 26516 students have consumed this course across the globe, and it has 4.4 stars with 6629 ratings. The subtitles of the video lectures are available in English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish.
You get 2 hours of on-demand video in this course, 5 downloadable resources with full lifetime access. This course is packed with many concepts and helps you learn all the PowerShell fundamentals in a short duration. You need to watch all the lectures and practice all the provided hands-on files across the lectures to get a good understanding on PowerShell from this course. Throughout this course, you will learn how to install and start-up PowerShell, basic data types in PowerShell, comparison operators, cmdlets command, aliases, working with objects, sorting, filtering, loops, formatting output, arrays & hash tables, saving data, importing data, writing functions including passing parameters and returning results, writing scripts and more. This course is ideal for beginners, system administrators, or folks responsible to take care of IT work in their organizations.
Windows PowerShell in less than 2 hours – 15 hands on demos!
This is among the highest-rated category PowerShell course on the Udemy platform created by Joseph Alex. Joseph has worked across different job roles, including software designer, programmer, IT operations analyst, and has a passion for teaching. Over 18940 students have gone through this amazing course on PowerShell, which has 4.7 stars with 4713 ratings. This course is ideal for anyone who wants to learn about PowerShell. This is a short course of 1.5 hours of on-demand video with full lifetime access.
This course starts with an introduction to PowerShell and the differences between Windows PowerShell VS PowerShell Core. Then it discusses command syntax, Get-Verb command, aliases and parameters, objects in PowerShell, commands to find your way around with demos on Get-Help and Get-Command. The course also covers computer hardware & operating system data, basic networking data, files & folders, performance counters, WMI and CIM, gathering info from OS event logs, variables, and introduction to remoting.
PowerShell: Getting Started
This course is on Pluralsight platform created by Michael Bender. Michael is a six-time Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), technical trainer, community leader, and author. The course has 759 ratings and an average of 4.5 stars. This course covers all the topics you need to know to begin with PowerShell. All the concepts taught in this course is based on PowerShell 7. The topics covered in this course are divided across different sections, including an introduction to PowerShell, PowerShell Basics, gathering information with PowerShell, remoting with PowerShell, and building a user inventory script with PowerShell.
You will learn how to gather information using PowerShell cmdlets and then delve into working with objects like files and users and learn real-world skills you can use immediately. Then this course discusses how to use the PowerShell to find all the answers you need as a system administrator in an organization. After finishing this course, you will know how to write your own scripts to gather information using PowerShell.
Introduction to PowerShell
This course is on the Pluralsight platform created by Robert Cain. Roberts is also a Microsoft MVP and owner of Arcane Training and Consulting, LLC with 25 years of experience in the IT industry. The course has over 1408 ratings with 4.5+ stars. The first section Beginning PowerShell of this course, covers basics of PowerShell, customizing the PowerShell interfaces, how aliases make PowerShell easy to learn and use, basic PowerShell commands, PowerShell providers. Next, the PowerShell variables section covers cmdlets, strings, arrays, hash tables, built-in PowerShell variables. This course also covers PowerShell programming concepts, including branching, PowerShell looping, script blocks, and variable scope. The last section PowerShell Advanced Programming talks about creating and extending functions, custom help, handling errors, working with files.
Final Thoughts
That was all about the best online courses for learning PowerShell. The courses mentioned in this article are enough to get started with PowerShell and gain a good understanding of writing your own scripts on PowerShell. You don’t just need to watch the lectures in these courses, you will also have to perform enough hands-on to get a real grip on PowerShell concepts. Go ahead and start your PowerShell journey now!
