Re: Serious question
I think much of the criticism of Powershell comes from either:
1. People who have never used it "because its Microsoft"
2. People who have used it a bit and become disillusioned as it is unlike other shells they have used.
I was not keen on it at first, but after having a few "Aha!" moments, I now could not do my job without it.
There are a few simple tricks that work wonders (like using get-member to fully understand all the properties and methods that belong to an object) and major performance tweaks like filter left, format right and not using += on large arrays.
Best advice I can offer is to actually read some of the various primers and best practice guides out there (both official and unofficial). They will give you some key understandings that you probably won't get by just diving in and playing around.
Being able to grab a collection of objects and cycle through them all with a foreach one liner lets me get results in seconds that using older methods could have taken hours.
Other methods would normally mean bending the output of one command into the input the next one needs. With Powershell, just send it all down the pipeline, then worry about formatting the output at the end.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
