The DSC Book

by Don Jones

and Steve Murawski

with contributions by Stephen Owen
cover design by Nathan Vonnahme

Visit Penflip.com/powershellorg to check for newer editions of this ebook.

This guide is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. The authors encourage you to redistribute this file as widely as possible, but ask that you do not modify the document.

This ebook is no longer being maintained. It was written for PowerShell v4.0, and is still partially applicable to the release of DSC included in PowerShell v5.0. However, this particular book will not be updated for v5. Please visit http://powershell.org/wp/ebooks for other free PowerShell.org ebooks.

About the Authors

Principal writing in this book was by Don Jones, President and CEO of PowerShell.org, Inc. and a multi-year recipient of Microsoft's MVP Award.

Additional writing, background information, and tech-checking were by Steve Murawski, possibly one of the earliest production adopters of DSC through his job at StackExchange, and one of Don's fellow PowerShell MVPs.

Several examples have been adapted, with permission, from http://foxdeploy.azurewebsites.net/2014/03/10/desired-state-configuration-what-it-is-and-why-you-should-care/ and other excellent posts by Stephen Owen.

It's important for you to know that this guide is very much a work in progress. We appreciate feedback (use the PowerShell Q&A forum at PowerShell.org), and welcome additional contributors. Because we're treating this book as an open-source project, you may be reading it before a complete tech-check has been completed - so we appreciate your patience!