First off, welcome back... We know this isn't your first rodeo and you should be up to speed rather quickly.
You will notice that this forum has become a minefield and requires careful searching and a lot of reading to avoid useless information, and quite honestly people have become harsh in thier responses to various things. Some people just post to post.
Aside for the previous competition manuals there has been alot of useful information sharing recently. Teams are posting their designs (full CAD models), scouting programs, build season journals, and even spreadsheet calculators to make our lives easier. Spend some time looking through the whitepapers hosted on the site.
Below are some of the recent
must reads...
Team 254's Build Blog From 2011
Team 254's Build Blog From 2010 Collaboration with 968
Team 33's Build Journal from 2011
Team 148's Build Journal from 2010
JVN's Engineering Design Process in Competition Robotics