My wife is an excellent cook. I can get by if the recipe is detailed enough (how much is a pinch??). Mike Bailey has given us a great deployment and server setup tool in deprec, but it seems that folks still have some problems getting up and running with it. In my opinion the utlimate usefuleness and time savings of deprec and capistrano is worth the initial cost of actually learning how to use it.

Here is a short walk through that hopefully will help highlight the startup process, and also help us keep track of some of the common issues/pitfalls.