The first thing I did in trying out this board was to plug it in to my computer, which requires a USB cable with a mini-B end on it.
The board doesn't come with it, but that's more than fine with me, as I seem to have been accumulating these cords for a while now - every little hobby board you buy seems to include these cords.
If you don't have this cord already, it's easy to find and quite inexpensive.
While you're at it, get a micro-B cord too so you can use the other USB port (also used in the demo, see below). I have one that came with my Android cell phone.
My first impression of this board was "Wow! That's a lot of pins!".
Having spent most of my time with Arduino Uno and TI launchpad lately, it's quite a nice surprise to have this much I/O so easily handy.
Starting up the board was really cool too - call me shallow, but I totally enjoyed seeing the multicoloured LED lights on this thing 
And having a motion sensor onboard is a nice bonus. They call it a MEMS sensor, so I wonder if it's more than just motion - will have to research that later.
It starts up with a nice little demo, which can also be hooked up to a computer with a micro-B USB cord to pretend to be a mouse. I hooked it up to my MacBook and it allowed me to move the mouse cursor around. Not a useable mouse, but it's a great demo of what it can do. The tutorial and source code for this built-in demo is available too, so I'm sure that will give a good start to figuring out how all the pieces work.
Oh yes, did I mention I'm using a MacBook for this? According to the packaging it will only run on Windows, but that's no different than most boards. The only one I've seen so far that easily runs on Mac is Arduino. For the rest, I've been using the free VirtualBox software to run WindowsXP in a window on my Mac.
So that's what I intend to do for this one too. I noticed I already have the software installed for the STM8L-Discovery board I received a year and a half ago - I wonder if it's the same software...
Here's another picture...
Cheers,
-Nico
