It might be worth getting hold of the 2 maya Programming books by David Gould, as well as Visual studio as than you can make the plug in using C++

As CTbram said, its a very abitous projsct for a first go. But If you really want to get it going then take one step at a time, have a look for the low man rigs and have a look at how the scripts are put together as that has quite a bot of the functionality that you seem to be after and might be a good place to start.