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 can provide, and I hope you continue to find the ebooks helpful!
The folks at Smarterer have agreed to let us - that’s all of us, as in “The PowerShell Community” - build a sort of “exam” for people to prove their PowerShell Proficiency. And I need your help to do it!
Step 1, you need to be pretty decent with PowerShell yourself. Not Level 12 Guru Level, mind you, but you should be working with it daily. Most of this book should make sense to you.
Step 2, you need to download my Quiz Question Writing Guide (It’s all of 1 page) and Topic List. PowerShell Quiz Guidelines is the download. Go on, I’ll wait.
**Step 3, **you need to sign up, using your e-mail address, and let me know you’re interested in helping. What you’re volunteering to do is, over the course of February 2015, write at least 20 questions. That’s about 2 questions per category. You’re also agreeing to help peer-review the questions other folks write, so we can spot the stinkers.
Signups are due by January 20th 2015
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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.
Topic submissions for the PowerShell Summit Europe are still open. If you want to be considered as a speaker please submit your topic very soon.
At the moment there aren’t enough submissions to enable us to put on a quality event. The 2014 European Summit was an excellent event with many good sessions – now is the time to submit your sessions. We need your sessions.
We have a policy of accepting sessions from new speakers as well as established experts. It’s not who you are but the quality of the session that counts.
Details on how to submit session proposals are available here
https://powershell.org/2014/11/24/call-for-presentations-for-powershell-summit-europe-2015/
Please submit your proposals soon as we can’t run the European PowerShell Summit without them! As a note, we are confirmed for Stockholm (or within a a short subway ride of Stockholm) for the timeframe indicated, although we don’t have the exact venue yet. It’s important that we get sessions lined up soon, so that we can begin general registration.
The NJ PowerShell User Group is having a meetup on Thursday, January 8th from 6:00 - 8:00 PM. If interested, please register through the Eventbrite website to track attendance for ordering pizza. For those attending online (Webex) we will send a follow-up email with the meeting link based on Eventbrite online registrants.
Agenda:
6:00 – 6:30: Pizza and socializing
6:30 – 7:30: Presentation
7:30 - 8:00: Q & A
Please note that the Webex meeting will start at 6:00 PM, but the actual presentation won't start until 6:30
In-Person attendees must register, print out their EventBrite ticket, and present it at the door. Walk-ins will not be permitted.
As of this post, PowerShell Summit North America 2015 is full, and registration has been cut off. We’re taking some time to confirm our numbers and venue capacity; if we’re able to open additional seats, that will happen in January 2015. We will allow any additional capacity to be registered until one month prior to the Summit, or until it sells out, whichever comes first. We do not maintain a waiting list; please check here and on the @PSHSummit Twitter feed for any announcements.
For those already registered, we _do not have any official hotel recommendations. _You’re welcome to use the Summit Forum to see where others are staying, or to arrange for carpooling or other stuff. We certainly encourage all attendees to check the Forum for Q&A and other discussion - it’s never too early to start getting involved. On the hotel front, just look for hotels in downtown Charlotte, or near Microsoft Charlotte, based on your preferences. The reason there’s no official hotel is that there are numerous business-class hotels nearby, and after a close call last year we didn’t want to take the financial risk of booking out a room block.
Our intent at this time is to book the venue to fire code capacity, which is why we may be able to open additional slots after we confirm everything. That means _both venue rooms will be full at all times. _You will not be permitted to stand or sit in the aisles, back of the room, or block the doorways. If the session you hoped to attend is full, you’ll need to go to the other one. Keep in mind we’re recording everything, so you won’t miss out entirely.
The last sessions on all three days will only have a single session. We’ll position the speaker in one of the two rooms, and we’ll live-stream to the other room. This is where we plan to put Jeffrey Snover’s talks, both to accommodate what has historically been high interest in his sessions, and to accommodate his total inability to do a session in only 45 minutes :). If you don’t get a chair in the “live” room, you’ll need to join from the “overflow” room.
The two rooms are actually in different buildings, separated from each other by a driveway/courtyard arrangement. We’re suggesting that you not bring your ginormous 21" laptop, since it’ll just drag you down moving between sessions. Maybe stick with a Surface if you want to take notes and stuff. Although we’re recording everything, so… you know. Maybe just enjoy the session.
Lunches will be taken in the session rooms, with buffet setups in the hallways just outside each room.
Stay tuned for further details, and please use the Summit forum to ask questions.
[UPDATE: We’ve gotten an outpouring of responses - I’m literally a bit teary-eyed right now - so I’ll work with the existing set of volunteers and post again should everyone realize what we’re asking and go running for the hills!]
We’re looking for a volunteer to take over regular maintenance of the PowerShell.org website. We may even have a small budget to make this a paid-contractor gig. Trick being, it’s gotta be done _regularly. _
The specifics:
