PS is absolutely essential if you are stuck administering Windows machines (esp. large numbers of them in a server farm). It makes working with Windows (mostly)

PS is absolutely essential if you are stuck administering Windows machines (esp. large numbers of them in a server farm). It makes working with Windows (mostly) tolerable if you are using a reasonably modern Windows version (2012+). Powershell has some nice features like native arrays and hashmaps which can be mixed together into complex objects and then converted to JSON. Combined with native web request cmdlets (Invoke-RestMethod et al) it makes interacting with web services easier than the bash equivalent, where you have to use curl/wget, string munging and jq (which isn't usually part of the standard install).