Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell at www.sysinternals.com has released freeware utility FileMon which is a device driver that can watch all file system activity. Useful to Windows NT admin.

It has advanced filtering and search capabilities that make it a powerful tool for exploring the way Windows works, seeing how applications use the files and DLLs, or tracking down problems in system or application configurations. Under Windows NT/2K Filemon can also be used to monitor named pipe activity.

New Riders has good NT texts.

Tim Hill's text on command line scripting is outstanding. If you have an extensive background, writing bat files, forget it. Otherwise, get it.

Windows scripting host is a different animal entirely to batchfile-like scripts. Much more powerful. Native scripting language for NT2000 but available for NT4. Start studying now. Includes builtin support for vbscript & jscript with addins available for perl and other scripting languages. Extraordinary powerful and subsequently it can be very complex.