Our friends over at Maniacal Labs did some playing around with the ESP8266 Wifi serial board. Daniel Ternes did a write-up on his experience getting a "hello world" up and and running and enumerated his lessons learned. He also talked about the steps he went through to update the firmware on the device that enabled it to run at baud rates higher that 9600bps.
Danial had to do a lot of digging to find the files and utilities needed to do the update. It's worth bookmarking the post for helpful hints if your just getting started with Wifi yourself.
We'll do some digging around and find all the latest and greatest tools and firmware, and libraries, and put link or host on our own page for the beastie.