On the windows desktop platform you can use JScript and the .NET Framework to write just about any desktop application you can imagine.

This language (which is a good implementation of up-to-date ECMAScript) is somewhat light on texts however. There is a SAMS book by Justin Rogers which does cover the basics.

You might be better off looking at something like Adobe AIR which is an excellent approach to making a web style application run like a desktop application - well worth exploring and could be a good platform for developing portable (and applicable) JavaScript skills.