I have usually worked with Arduino on a breadboard as described here.
I decided that I would take advantage of the Modern Devices RBBB and the Wulfden P4 serial connector.(Both available at Modern Devices) Now I can just plug these into a breadboard and do the prototying. When the prototyping is done, I can assemble the finished board on either a PCB as descirbed here or on my more usual soldered board. This saves all the time of building each board on the breadboard and then debugging the serial coms problems. On my laptops which do not have Serial board, I use a prolific USB to Serial convertor with the setup. It seems to work just fine.