I was looking for some info about how to setup a barebones Arduino on a breadboard and found these 2 excellent articles:
at ucHobby: this article was written almost 2 years ago but all the information is still valid
at ITP Physical Computing: a lot of details and step by step instructions.
There is also a forum post in the Arduino forum with more information, including some about programmers.
I hope this will be as helpful to you as it was to me.