You'll need some basic kitchen tools such as measuring cups, measuring spoons, knives, cutting board, sauce pans, skillets, stirring spoons, spatulas, etc. I also highly recommend you use a meat thermometer to make sure your meat is fully cooked and safe to eat. Most thermometers will include a guide listing the appropriate temperature for different types of meat. Below I've listed a few other items I've found to be particularly useful.
I've found that the ability to program a slow cooker greatly increases its usefulness. Prepare your ingredients the night before your planned meal. Put everything together and start it in the morning. While you're at work or going about your day it will run it's cooking cycle. Once the cycle is complete it'll switch to its keep warm function until your ready for dinner. It does require some planning to cook this way, but your actual time investment will be minimal. I've also tried to stick with recipes that don't require you to intervene at any point during the cooking cycle so you can truly set it and forget it.
These things have all kinds of uses that I haven't even begun to explore yet. The keep warm function is very handy for set it and forget it recipes. I find that I use mine most for cooking rice then keeping it warm until I am ready to eat. For perfect white rice the rice to water ratio is 1:1.5. It can also significantly cut down the cooking time on dry beans, meat, and slow cooker recipes. I've found it to be the best way to hard boils eggs. Do this by cooking for 7 minutes high pressure, quick release, then cool them in an ice water bath. They will peel perfectly every time!
Sometimes recipes will can for ingredients by weight rather than volume. A scale will be handy for these situations. Another awesome trick is to convert your recipes to weight. Then when you are adding your ingredients just reset the scale to zero after each one. That way you can just pour the ingredients in to the designated weight without having to dirty all your measuring spoons and cups. It works great and saves a lot of time and dishes!