Hands-On: Intermediate PowerShell

A script can calculate the right value and still return an unexpected extra item, confuse a CSV number with text, or leave a temporary file behind after a failure. This course gives those behaviors a concrete place to practice. You complete sixteen code exercises across four chapters, with about 128 minutes planned for reading, implementation, and a normal debugging attempt. Each task supplies a small input contract and an observable result so you can compare what your code produced with what the caller needs.

The first chapter develops named arguments, defaults, integer conversion, success output, and keyed lookups. You then transform and group records, join reference data, and handle quoted CSV fields without treating a numeric column as a number automatically. The text chapter uses literal string methods to parse fields, then adds membership filters, wildcard matching, category dispatch, and bounded scans. The final chapter combines caught failures, cleanup, helper scripts, and explicit scope. Its capstone reconciles parsed text with CSV reference rows, returns a JSON report, and checks the temporary file state on both success and failure.

This course suits learners who have completed the beginner PowerShell course or can already write ordinary functions, loops, object pipelines, virtual text-file operations, and JSON conversions. Practice runs in the browser with small deterministic data and virtual files. The focus is reusable scripting behavior you can inspect directly.