Using Arduino microcontrollers without board I am new into Arduino. So if I program the microcontroller using the Arduino board and once it is doing what I want can I just take the microcontroller out of the board and use the microcontroller itself? If so could you please guide me to some tutorials on how to use it?
I have a post about a breadboard Arduino - in that I demonstrate the minimal amount of parts you need to use the controller (which is not much).

Example of wiring it up:



If you want to use an external crystal or resonator you can add that to the board like this:



8 MHz crystal shown, but you could use 16 MHz. Or change the fuses and use the internal oscillator.



Schematic showing how you could (if you wanted) add an ICSP header and an FTDI header: