Good sites for windows scripting:

win32 scripting
msdn.microsoft.com

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.

lots of good examples

For data manipulation and general scripting, don't forget Perl.