A lot of good files to have are here at
sholes.info: Important files
Includes the rooting app, nandroid backup app, original dump of nexus rom and the Droid kernel among others.
I ended up using this
rooting app as others didn't grant me superuser permission from my phone (only had access from the adb shell on my computer)
You'll want the Android
Software Development Kit from google.
If you're a Windows guy you'll want the
USB debugging tools for the Droid from Motorola.
I hate to link another forum, but this is probably
section at alldroid.org to look at the really nice ROMs and communicate with who's developing them.