Group-Object for categorization in PowerShell - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Group-Object for categorization

📖 Scenario: You work in a small bookstore. You have a list of books with their genres. You want to organize the books by their genre to see how many books you have in each category.

🎯 Goal: Create a PowerShell script that groups books by their genre using Group-Object and shows the count of books in each genre.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an array of books with their genres

Use a variable to hold the list of books

Use Group-Object to group books by genre

Display the genre and the count of books in each genre

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Grouping data by categories is common in reports, logs, and inventory management to quickly understand distribution.

💼 Career

Many IT and automation jobs require organizing and summarizing data using PowerShell or similar scripting tools.

1

Create the list of books

Create a variable called $books that holds an array of hashtables. Each hashtable should have two keys: Title and Genre. Add these exact entries:
@{Title='The Hobbit'; Genre='Fantasy'},
@{Title='1984'; Genre='Dystopian'},
@{Title='The Catcher in the Rye'; Genre='Classic'},
@{Title='The Lord of the Rings'; Genre='Fantasy'},
@{Title='Brave New World'; Genre='Dystopian'}

PowerShell

# Create the $books array with the given entries
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use @() to create an array and @{} to create hashtables inside it.

2

Prepare to group books by genre

Create a variable called $groupedBooks but do not assign it yet. This will hold the grouped result later.

PowerShell

$books = @(
    @{Title='The Hobbit'; Genre='Fantasy'},
    @{Title='1984'; Genre='Dystopian'},
    @{Title='The Catcher in the Rye'; Genre='Classic'},
    @{Title='The Lord of the Rings'; Genre='Fantasy'},
    @{Title='Brave New World'; Genre='Dystopian'}
)

# Create the $groupedBooks variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just create the variable $groupedBooks and set it to $null for now.

3

Group the books by genre

Assign to $groupedBooks the result of grouping $books by the Genre property using Group-Object.

PowerShell

$books = @(
    @{Title='The Hobbit'; Genre='Fantasy'},
    @{Title='1984'; Genre='Dystopian'},
    @{Title='The Catcher in the Rye'; Genre='Classic'},
    @{Title='The Lord of the Rings'; Genre='Fantasy'},
    @{Title='Brave New World'; Genre='Dystopian'}
)

# Group $books by Genre and assign to $groupedBooks
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the pipeline | and Group-Object -Property Genre to group the books.

4

Display the grouped result

Use a foreach loop to go through each group in $groupedBooks. For each group, print the genre name and the count of books in that group in this exact format:
Genre: [GenreName], Count: [Count]

PowerShell

$books = @(
    @{Title='The Hobbit'; Genre='Fantasy'},
    @{Title='1984'; Genre='Dystopian'},
    @{Title='The Catcher in the Rye'; Genre='Classic'},
    @{Title='The Lord of the Rings'; Genre='Fantasy'},
    @{Title='Brave New World'; Genre='Dystopian'}
)

$groupedBooks = $books | Group-Object -Property Genre

# Loop through $groupedBooks and print Genre and Count
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use foreach ($group in $groupedBooks) and inside the loop use Write-Output with $group.Name and $group.Count.