the arduino platform is generally pretty flexible. Nearly all of it's pins can be reassigned to do certain tasks. typically, all you need to do to hook it up to a peripheral is wire it to whichever pins you want to use to drive it. Check out the playground on
Arduino - HomePage. they have a lot of really good examples and code to get you started. I would also suggest looking into the 4bit LCD library, so it will cut down on how many wires you have to connect and free up some pins to use for other things (cuts it from 8 wires to 4), that's what I use with my lcd.