I would advise against shell and batch file stuff: it's not a good way to get the fundamentals of programming. I would very strongly advise against Visual Basic: hideous language, and platform specific too! A first language should be clean and well-designed, to start making the key ideas of programming plain. One can do the horrible but pragmatically useful stuff later. [Confession: yes, I teach this stuff in university.]
Hmmm..maybe that's why I never really dug VB.
I am surprised by your scripting comment, I think the logic skills (if then, etc.) are pretty paramount to programming. Sure they are structured differently, but I don't see how they couldn't help to get a feel for things.
