What You Should Know Now — and What's Next

What You Should Know Now

• Finding and learning commands with Get-Command, Get-Help, and Get-Member
• The object pipeline: filtering, sorting, selecting, grouping, and measuring
• Variables, types, strings, operators, and collections
• Conditionals, switch, and loops
• Scripts, execution policy, functions, and advanced functions with validated parameters
• Error handling with try/catch, streams, and -WhatIf
• Files, CSV, JSON, XML, regular expressions, and REST APIs
• Modules, Pester tests, and debugging
• Classes, .NET, parallelism, and jobs
• Remoting, scheduling, and managing Windows and cloud resources
• Security, performance, module publishing, and CI/CD

What Should You Learn Next?

• Your platform in depth — Windows Server and Active Directory, Microsoft 365 and Entra ID (Microsoft Graph), or Azure — whichever you manage.
• Infrastructure as code — Desired State Configuration, Bicep or Terraform, and Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions pipelines.
• C# — PowerShell is built on .NET, and C# lets you write binary cmdlets, understand .NET APIs, and build larger tools.
• Bash — most servers and containers run Linux; Bash is the everyday shell there, and the two complement each other well.
• Python — Python for data processing and automation where its libraries fit better.

Build Something

Pick a task you or your team do by hand every week — creating accounts, checking servers, compiling a report — and automate it as an advanced function with help, -WhatIf, logging, and tests. Share it as a module so others can use it too.