Virtual Machines

At the moment I'm trying to setup a PHP development environment on a virtual machine using VirtualBox and Vagrant and I'm really struggling with this.

All the tuts that I find online are either incomplete, outdated or plainly just to complicated to follow for an average user so I'm a bit lost, hence why I'm writing this topic, maybe some of you guys can help me a out here.

First of all, I found a lot of notions that I don't really understand such as: puppet, chef, cookbooks and recipes. I don't really understand the difference between the first two and the last two.

That takes me to my second issue. From what I read I understand that the easiest way to setup a VM environment with Vagrant is with the help of cookbooks so I went to Opscode's website and there are dozens of them, which ones do I need to install? What are the bare minimum things I need to install in order for my PHP environment to work? What about the "nice to have" ones?

Ideally, what I would need is a step by step guide on how to setup all this or someone that could walk me through it but some useful hints or links would also be greatly appreciated.

Oh, one more thing...there is one tool that I know I'll want to have, and that is Guard, for monitoring and handling my SASS files, other than that I'm open to suggestions.

Thanks in advance! Vladimir