I also recently connected my home PC to a wireless router (Linksys WRT54G) to setup a home network and share my DSL connection and it was fairly easy. All you need to do is to connect the DSL modem to the Linksys and connect my PC directly to the router via RJ45.

The rest of the notebooks connect wirelessly to the linksys. Everything was fairly straightforward except for setting up the security options for wireless (WEP and MAC filtering).

The router is standalone in the sense that the wireless notebooks can connect to the internet even if the wired PC is turned off.