Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) tells readers everything they need to know in order to harness the power of WMI to automate vast parts of Windows 2000 workstation and server management. The book starts with the absolute basics, teaching the fundamentals of WMI terminology and the VBScript programming language. By the time readers complete the book, the readers will not only have the ability to use the scripts supplied, but also have a good understanding of both WMI and VBScript.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 7 Ratings

Excellent Book - 2002-02-26
Reviewer Rating:
The authors of this book not only show expert knowledge in WMI and scripting, but expert insight on explaining the subject in the best possible way. As a VBScript 'programmer' wanting to learn WMI, I almost broke down in tears when a plethora of helpful info that took me weeks to learn, was explained as tips within the first few chapters. I wish this was the first VBScript book I had read.

This book was cleverly put together to provide and excellent book for people new or experienced with VBScript. It contains one chapter of VBScript which you can skip if you like, and tips throughout to explain VB Script specific functions which can be easily skipped if you know VBScript and are only concerned with WMI. I did review the VBScript chapter, and found it the best reading I've seen on the subject. This book together with a VBScript syntax reference (available from microsoft.com) are all you need to learn and apply VBScript, quickly. I also bought WMI essentials (SAMS), which I wont be reading.

The New Riders Expert series has come through again. (picture in circle on cover)

- Satisfied Customer

Good for sysadmins/scripters, limited in use for programmers - 2002-02-21
Reviewer Rating:
If you're concerned with automating system administration of Win2K boxes using scripting this might be the book for you.

If, however, you are interested in writing management applications you will not find the information you need here.

The subtitle of the book says it all "expert scripting insight for Windows 200 administrators" so maybe I'm being a little hard on this book but Amazon doesn't show the subtitle so make sure this is what you're after before you buy the book.

Good... but... - 2004-05-07
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Windows Management Instrumentation - 2003-02-27
Reviewer Rating:
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!

It's a great WMI book for VBscripting admins - 2003-03-19
Reviewer Rating:
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.

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Operating Systems > Windows 1.xx, 2.xx, 3.xx, Workgroups