John is rite on, there are a few things about 5.3 that differ a bit, there is a thread in the announcements area of this forum that discusses these differences.
In addition to the Before You Begin guide there is also a new Web Development Work Flow guide that has gone up. It is a step by step approach to the workflow that is involved in creating a dynamic site. Here is a link to the page:
web-dev-workflow.php
In section 4 there are some topics about setting up the connection and other dynamic activities.