publishing and books

This is a good book for system administrators who utilize WMI on a daily basis to help automate tasks. The author does a decent job of explaining how to incorporate WMI into VBScript to retrieve information from the WMI about the local computer to aid in tasks such as hardware management, application management and other inventory/asset tasks that a sysadmin would be faced with on a daily basis.

However, if you are looking for a pure WMI reference, this book falls far short. It does not cover many of the classes available in WMI, and outside of VBScript provides no other access methods for WMI (any there are tons). The author basically misses the power of WMI by focusing on single tasks that can be in a one-off approach instead of looking of WMI as a whole and seeing its power in management across a large network or Enterprise.

A good book for the one-off tasks that normally would take quite a bit of time; a not-so-good book for the programmer wanting to get into a deep understanding of WMI.

The authors do a good job of showing lots of WMI VBscript code examples, and they weave it together with good explanatory prose. Using this book, along with the WMI SDK docs and samples from Microsoft gave me enough info to do some usefull stuff with WMI.

I have been working on de-cyphering the WMI layers for the last couple of months. Microsoft's documentation is lacking to say the least. This book allowed me to get up to speed in a matter of three days!

Highly recommend!