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Tools for Getting Started

Whether new to Drupal, new to theming or an old hand at both, find something here to make life easier.

Acquia

Of course, Acquia has it's own Drupal stack installers for easy installation of Drupal + the underlying AMP stack (Apache, MySQL and PHP) it runs on.
http://acquia.com/downloads

Theme Developer Module

The Drupal Developer module includes an extremely useful module called Theme Developer, which shows you stuff like template suggestions and theme functions.
http://drupal.org/project/devel

Coder Module

The Coder module assists with code review and version upgrade. It will tell where you need to clean up your code to Drupal coding standards.
http://drupal.org/project/coder

Content Templates (Contemplate)

This module is incredibly useful for finding the variables for theming various Drupal and CCK elements.
http://drupal.org/project/contemplate

Firebug

Firebug is a Firefox plugin that will make your theming life a lot easier. Use it to inspect HTML and CSS, and prototype styles live in the browser.
http://getfirebug.com

Web Developer Toolbar

Adds a menu and a toolbar to Firefox with various helpful web developer tools.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

A Starter Theme

Many Drupal themers make use of a starter theme. Most starter themes are highly developed and several work more like theme frameworks with many tools to aid themers. Many come with reset.css, layout.css and a styles.css file. Most have custom templates for page, node, block and comment and advanced preprocess function to either add or modify variables (such as dynamic classes for nodes and pages).

One advantage is you get an XHMTL valid theme with all the default variables printing in each template. You also get a layout that is well tested and cross browser compliant (all the starter themes I have tested have been very robust). Additionally themes such as Genesis and Blueprint reset Drupal core CSS to make it easier to work with. Themes such as Genesis and Zen come with many empty CSS selectors in modular stylesheets to make it very easy to identify each elements selectors (using Firebug).

Genesis, Zen and Tendu all have the Conditional Styles module built in which allows you to add conditional stylesheets via the themes info file.

Recommended Starter Themes:

There are many more to choose from, here is a list of Drupal starter themes: http://drupal.org/node/323993