operating systems

This book rates a '5' for me due to the abundance of _usable_ scripting examples. Most scripting books I've read (and I own _several_) have completely useless examples of things no system administrator would find necessary to accomplish (Hello World ad nauseam). My job often requires that I write VBScripts and I always reference this book when trying to determine a solution. As a matter of fact, the CD version gets launched immediately after my scripting editor when I'm coding.

These guys _know_ scripting and it shows in the primers and explanations of the code. It's been very helpful to have the 'plain English' step-throughs provided with each coding sample. It's not unusual for me to find the exact snippet of code I need and just copy and paste it into my own scripts. That's a real time saver!

Their use of Hungarian notation as a variable naming convention helps keep the code easy to read, debug and professional looking. When I've passed scripts on to 'real' developers, they often express their appreciation for that. (I've scripted enterprise solutions taken from the book that had stumped our developers).

The WMI scripting tool, Scriptomatic (and the downloadable EZADScriptomatic for ADSI scripting...) are real time-savers as well. I've found them very helpful in learning the capabilities of the technologies.

To reiterate: the Scripting Guys _ROCK_!

This book is massive!

I will hand it to the reader from Indy that there are some typos, but every book I have seen that contains code has typos. Usually, this is attributed to the fact that the person(s) who edit the book, don't understand the material. Most coders are not good editors, and most editors are not good coders.

Putting that aside, I found this book to be an extremely valuable REFERENCE. I put that in caps because if you try to read it from cover to cover, you will wind up in a mental facility making little wicker baskets. That's probably what happened to the editors. ;)

In addition to typos, these books frequently suffer from very bad indexes. The accompanying CD compensates for this shortcoming by providing a fully searchable electronic version of the book.

This book is a must-have, but it is not the scripting book to start with. If you are just starting, get Stanek's Windows 2000 Scripting Bible.

This is one of the best, if not THE best scripting book I have read. As it states, it is written for the administrator, so its focus is limited to that aspect of scripting. But it is so well focused, well written, concise and full of pertinent examples that I couldn't help but learn more about scripting that is applicable to all aspects of scripting. I have applied lessons learned here to Access VBA, for example, with great effect.
If you have only one book on scripting, this is it. It covers VBScript, JScript, ADSI, WMI, etc. Very well done and well worth the price.