The MBP is my development machine, so I needed all of my tools installed with the ability to update them with ease. In the past, I used MacPorts to take care of my MySQL, Memcached, and Ruby installions and it worked just fine. This time around however, I wanted something new and fun. Homebrew.
Homebrew is a new package manager for OS X. Unlike Fink or MacPorts, Homebrew integrates with the core operating system, reducing the number of extra libraries to install etc. Another neat feature is the ability to write software package recipes in Ruby, awesome.
Here are some raw installation instructions (clean system). I like to keep everything under user ownership to make life more enjoyable, say no to sudo.
You will need the latest version of xcode, you can get it here. After the installation is complete, you may continue.
sudo mkdir /usr/local