The third edition of the PowerShell Conference Book is now available and on sale at the discounted price of $19.99. But you need to hurry because the discounted price is only available until Friday evening!
What is the PowerShell Conference Book?
The book is designed to be a representation of what it’s like when you attend a conference. Traditional books have a singular topic, such as “Windows Server 2019” or “Mastering Ansible”. But this book is not geared towards a single topic. Instead, much like a conference, it’s a collection of ideas all focused around a general theme. All the chapters are related in some way to PowerShell and DevOps. The book contains over 20 different chapters, each written by a different author. The authors of the book are community members and subject matter experts who have graciously donated their time and knowledge for a good cause. Each chapter is similar in length and focus to what it would be like if you attended a conference and listened to the author present their topic to a live audience, except now it’s in written form. Imagine if you were able to capture those sessions and lock them into a format that you could refer to over and over again. It’s a conference in a book format!
The timeline for this process should be as follows:
Close submissions on Monday, May 4th, at 11:00 PM PDT
Notify everyone by May 25th
Final drafts will be due by June 1st
Finalize publication by September 30th
We are looking for one chapter per author on the topics of PowerShell, DevOps, WinOps, Open Source, or IT Careers. Topic depths can range from novice to expert. Chapters can be technical or cover cultural aspects. Authors can be new or well established. The book will be written in American English, but non-native speakers are welcome (our editorial team will support you)!
I’ve launched a new book project, which I’m hoping you’ll support: Shell of an Idea, the Untold History of PowerShell is now available for pre-purchase at a $10 discount on Leanpub. You’ll get the initial introductory chapters right now, and when I start pumping out the main manuscript in April-May 2020, you’ll get that too. The price will rise to the final $30 after the first 100 preorders, so don’t delay too much if you want in on the deal. This is a big project, and it’s involving a few flights up to Redmond for sit-down interviews with key folks - hence the pre-order, to help fund those trips. I’m going all the way back in time to the earliest days of PowerShell Monad Babylon Kermit, yeah it went through a lot of names and concepts! I plan to fill this not only with interesting facts, but also personal anecdotes from the folks who were there, and some back-of-house stories about the inevitable politics and challenges the shell saw on its path to life. I’m also collecting personal anecdotes from people who’ve been impacted by PowerShell. I’d love to hear about life before PowerShell (how easy was automation back then, and how important was it to you?), how PowerShell changed your job or career, or anything like that. I’ll weave all of that into the book too, because the story of PowerShell is mainly the story of the people who made it and the people who adopted it. Thanks for your support, and tell a friend!
Now available in “preview” is a new ebook, **PowerShell.org: History of a Community. ** There’s still a bit left to write, but this short (under 30 pages at the moment) ebook is designed to share some of what went into the building of PowerShell.org, the PowerShell Summit, and so on. The goal is to help those who may become involved with the organization in the future understand some of the decisions that have been made to this point. It’s also intended as a collection of “lessons learned” about building and nurturing a technology community in general, for anyone who might be interested. It digs a bit into the organization’s path to being a nonprofit, as well. Grab the book now from https://leanpub.com/powershellorghistoryofacommunity. I suggest allowing Leanpub to email you when it’s updated, as it assuredly will be. I’d very much like your feedback. Ask questions - what about the organization and its past or future isn’t currently covered? What questions does the book leave you with after you read it? What could make it more helpful, or clearer? Feel free to drop comments right here on this post, or use the book’s “Email the author(s)” link on Leanpub to send an email.
We’re pleased to announce the re-launch of our Free eBook Store, now hosted exclusively on Leanpub. This re-launch includes 7 titles translated into Spanish by community contributor Alvaro Torres. All eBooks are free, although you can also choose to pay any amount of $5 or more, which becomes a donation to The DevOps Collective, Inc. Leanpub offers a web-based reader and, if you “buy” the book, options to download in EPUB, MOBI, and PDF formats. We used to dual-publish on Leanpub and GitBook; GitBook no longer supports ebook downloading (they’re online-only, now) and Leanpub now offers a free online reader mode, so we’re moving exclusively to Leanpub. Leanpub does offer a smartphone app as well, which you can use to manage your entire Leanpub library. Don’t forget that all of the books’ “source” is hosted at GitHub in public open-source repositories. You’re welcome to fork the repos, submit pull requests, and so on. Note that we don’t provide technical support for the books at GitHub; please use the Forums for that. Further, while everyone appreciates suggestions for improving the books, what we really appreciate are community members who can fork the repo, implement their suggestions, and submit a pull request! Please help us spread the word so more people can use these great, entirely-free resources!
After dealing with numerous problems from PenFlip (where our free ebooks are currently located), we’ve decided to try two new hosting providers: GitBook and LeanPub. Both of these are, or can be, based on Git/GitHub, which means the Markdown text of the book will always be open-sourced and available. Both offer conversion into PDF, MOBI, and EPUB formats, so you can download whichever you want. Both enable us to update the books at any time. Both are relatively easy to use; GitBook provides a moderately better writing experience since they provide a native app that kind of hides the Git-i-ness, but it’s not a huge deal. More or less the same thing could be assembled for LeanPub if we wanted. They do their formatting slightly differently, so it’s worth looking at each to see which you like better. We don’t have a ton of control over their formatting, so what you see in these tests is what you get. LeanPub offers two key differences:
Over the past few weeks, Matt Penny has been busy moving our free eBooks into their new home on Penflip. Code, when available, is located in our GitHub repo, and modules will soon be available in the PowerShell Gallery for downloading via Install-Module. Penflip is a Markdown-based editing system backed by GitHub. This means anyone can contribute corrections, additional material, and so on - which will make it easier to maintain these great books over time. You can download ebooks directly from Penflip in a variety of e-book formats. We’re now focused on electronic formats, rather than traditional page-based layout, although PDF is still an available download option if you want to make a hardcopy. The conversion from Word to Markdown was challenging and largely manual, so if you run across formatting problems (especially with code), we absolutely appreciate your help in fixing those. Simply “branch” the book, creating your own copy of the project. Make corrections, and then submit those back to the master branch. Approvals are manual, so give us a few days to review what you’ve done and merge it into the master. Massive thanks to Matt for all the long hours making this conversion happen, and to the folks who’ve submitted cover art for the new books.
We’re in the process of migrating our free ebook collection over to Penflip, an online, Git-based collaborative authoring and publishing tool. Matt Penny has taken the lead in converting our Word documents to the Markdown syntax used by Penflip, and as you can see on our ebooks page, most of the titles now have an initial version in Penflip. One neat thing about Penflip is that anyone can register for a free account, fork one of our projects, and make their own modifications. You can then submit your changes back to the master branch, so we can incorporate your changes into the ebook. This will make it easy for everyone in the community to suggest new content, offer corrections, and so on. I encourage you to help out - right now, you may simply notice some flaws from the semi-automated and fully hellish Markdown conversion, and we’d love your assistance in correcting those. Penflip also supports on-demand downloads of each ebook in a variety of common formats, including EPUB, PDF, and more. That means you’ll always be able to grab the latest version of your favorite ebook. We’ve not yet migrated the source code that goes with some of the ebooks; the plan is to move those into our GitHub repo over the next week. Penflip will be enabling the next generation of our ebooks, including a massive new DSC title I plan to begin working on in 2015. Thanks for any help you canprovide, and I hope you continue to find the ebooks helpful!
Fancy yourself a graphics person? Just like to doodle? We’re holding a contest to create new covers for our various ebooks. Winners will receive absolutely nothing, other than a cover credit within the text (hey, we’ll also give you a full set of the ebooks for free, what the heck).
Covers must include the book title, and should include the PowerShell.org logo. The logo is below.
Don’t include author names in the artwork. Authors are credit on the book’s “About” page.
Images must be 8.5" wide by 11" high, preferably at 300dpi, in PNG or JPG format (see these specifications if you need that sizing in pixels).
Don’t include art, photos, or any other elements that you yanked off the Internet, including Microsoft imagery, unless you can provide us with written permission from the copyright holder to use it.
You can submit a series for all the books, or just covers for the book or books you like best. Be serious. Have fun. Whatever! Send submissions via e-mail to Admin, right here at PowerShell.org. We’ll let you submit until the **end of January 2015, **and we’ll pick the best selections we have at the time.
We’ve just finished a massive re-do of all 7 PowerShell.org free ebooks. First, they’re now hosted in a public OneDrive folder. This means you can quickly and easily view them online, download a DOCX, or download a PDF. Anytime, anywhere. Second, we’ve had folks go through and make the formatting more consistent, using a more modern font and somewhat “airier” spacing. Hopefully that translates to “nicer to read.” All the original code is also accessible, and available for one-click downloading. Note that .PS1 files may open for viewing; you need to checkmark the file to download it. Uploads are now proceeding, so depending on when you read this, some files might still be in progress. The GitHub versions (which were problematic for some folks to download) will be removed shortly. Please update your links; https://powershell.org/ebooks has already been updated. Enjoy!
