The Arduino web site is probably the best single resource for anyone who has questions about Arduino.

If you don't have one yet I highly recommend the Arduino Experimenters Kit (ARDX). It gets you started with all of the basic things you need to know, and has enough parts to get you started making your own projects. You can get it from either Adafruit or Oomlout, depending on what part of the world you're on.

http://www.adafruit.com/products/170

http://oomlout.com/a/products/ardx/

If you have never done any programming at all the Getting Started With Arduino is a decent start, but don't waste your time and money unless programming a computer scares you to death.

From there the Arduino web site and forums are a great resource and deal with questions from complete beginners all the time.

I really wanted my hand held. So I visited http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/ for a simple, bite-sized tutorial.