Topic: Introduction to the Language Constructs

Notice: This post is a part of the PowerShell Monday series — a group of quick and easy to read mini lessons that briefly cover beginning and intermediate PowerShell topics. As a PowerShell enthusiast, this seemed like a beneficial way to ensure those around me at work were consistently learning new things about Windows PowerShell. At some point, I decided I would share these posts here, as well. Here’s the PowerShell Monday Table of Contents.

I’ve long had this feeling that people that learn and use PowerShell don’t really ever get  a fair opportunity, to learn the language constructs. Instead, they just learn them as necessary. In an effort to correct this, I believe we should spend some time in the coming weeks, covering each of them.

Well then, what’s a language construct, right? Well, it’s a control structure, of course. Okay, well then what’s that?

Within a language — PowerShell in our instance — we have to have a way to handle conditional situations, in order to take appropriate action(s). Language constructs are the If statement and its variations, it’s the switch statement, it’s the foreach loop and ForEach-Object, the for, the Do variations, and the While loop, too.

In the coming weeks, we’ll spend some time with each of the constructs, so that you’ve seen and used them all, or simply reviewed them, if you’ve used them before. Knowing which to use when, is a vital skill, and best left to second nature once you’ve had experience with them all. I’ll be sure to include some of the times you might choose one over the other, when you can do the same thing with more than just one of the constructs. We’ll start next Monday with If, If-Else, and If-ElseIf.