If you want to learn WSH scripting end to end, the
resources provided are all excellent. Lots of info out there, not necessarily
any of it is comprehensive as someone always leaves something out but good
nonetheless.
If you want to learn based on doing things and expand out
from there look at the "Cookbooks" that have been published by O'Reilly. For AD
stuff, you want the Active Directory Cookbook 2E. For Exchange you want the
Exchange Cookbook (though there is some of the common AD related tasks in the AD
Cookbook). For general Server type items check out the Windows Server Cookbook.
If you want Windows Server security related items you want the Windows Server
2003 Security Cookbook.
The nice thing about these books is that they are task
oriented which tend to fit people's jobs better and are usually, IMO, easier for
people to learn from because they are doing something they care about, not
outputting "how now brown cow" or "hello world". Once you start seeing how
things are done, it can help understand the more abstract teachings in the "all
about _vbscript_ing" type sources.
There are also lots of scripts available in the Technet
Script Center but the organization of that whole thing last time I checked about
drove me insane. I knew what I wanted and half the time couldn't find
it...
As Darren mentioned, you may want to consider looking at
PowerShell. It is the new and improved Windows Scripting environment, for that
there is a book called Monad (also by O'Reilly) that isn't too bad and does a
nice walkthrough to build you up though like any book that is trying to teach
scripting or programming may be considered a little dry.
As others mentioned, WSH is sort of a framework that
provides common interfaces, etc and allows multiple script engines to be used
such as perlscript, _vbscript_, REXX, jscript, Python, etc.
You can also use standalone perl which if you intend to do
anything cross/platform you may want to consider plus IMO, it blows _vbscript_ out
of the water. Especially if you need to call out to command line tools or parse
any kind of string stuff. I have written a considerable amount of _vbscript_,
primarily for ASP web sites and small utility scripts and I can't say that I
ever liked it, it is silly that it misses basic things like sort, etc. I much
preferred my work with REXX and later my work with perl which I still primarily
use now. My preferences when putting something together is perl and if I can't
do something in perl then c/c++. If I can't use perl then I will use _vbscript_ or
jscript.
joe
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Stu Packett
Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2006 10:00 AM
To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org
Subject: [ActiveDir] Beginner's Book on Scripting - WSH or _vbscript_?
