concerning the chesspointers you asked for chopper:
(i) most important would be playing MANY MANY games! yahoo-games offers a very nice interface for playing opponents of all levels but there is of course many others around the web.
(ii) play quick games to see more board patterns in the same amount of time to start building a vocabulary of typical formations. 5min/5min i.e. maximum 10 minutes duration for a full game should be good as a starting point for a few thousand games.
(iii) read books. there is many times more literature on chess than on poker. probably because the game has been around so much longer. theory of the game splits into 4 major areas:
a.) opening
b.) middle game tactics (analysis of the game tree)
c.) middle game strategy (long term planning without knowledge of concrete sequence of moves)
d.) endgame.
if i had to rank these by importance to get started these would go: bcad.
with b.) i.e. tactics the most important. no point in having a great longterm plan when you are going to blow it through some tactical fumble. then you would have to know strategy i.e. knowing what kind of longterm plans makes sense in what situation and how to evaluate if their realization might be reasonable. you will then have to look at opening theory which, since the advent of databases, has evolved a great deal through the last 15 years. maybe this is the most boring part of chess but no way past that one from a certain level onwards. endgame i believe to be the least important because at early levels the game is mostly already decided when the game reaches this stage.
my favourite author of chessbooks: awerbach (tactics, strategy, endgame)
(iv) programs: "fritz" is a must-have to analyze positions, look up openings or use as a demanding opponent. "chessmaster" i also like a lot especially when you have decent database of some 100.000s or more grandmaster games to go with it.

cheers