I work at an Agricultural High School in Mississippi. Fortunately it is a very forward thinking therefore they have almost a 1 to 1 ratio of Computers to Students on wireless mostly (my predecessors choice).  I am looking at scripting hard for the future since it appears that I will be the lone full-time staff member.  Enough background I am looking for benign scripts in the Hello World since that will help me develop.  We have SQL 2005 servers, Win 2003 R2 Enterprise, Soon a Sharepoint Server, Exchange 2003, 3 AD's, an SQL 2000 cluster, any suggestions and templates will be GREATLY appreciated. 

Probably the greatest resource (at the moment) is the Microsoft Script Center - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/default.mspx -  a number of languages are covered including PowerShell and VBScript.

If you are new to scripting then PowerShell may be a bit harder to learn than VBScript but it is definitely the scripting method of the future for Microsoft environments - it will be in Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008 and is already built in to Exchange 2007.

There are a number of book sand courses available to help you get started and you can always post questions here

Hi.  I just created a post that may be of help to you.  I understand where you're coming from - I work for a school as well.

Hope you're able to get up to speed soon.  Stay involved and ask questions - hopefully this community will return the time you invest. :)

Anyway, the post is here:

http://www.powershellcommunity.org/Forums/tabid/54/forumid/1/postid/1136/view/topic/Default.aspx

did some elementary boot disks in DOS maybe a VBscript 7-8 years ago. I know I have a lot to go.