Blender Cycles Texture Nodes How-to

Blender’s current internal renderer is quite old and is being updated with a modern renderer called Cycles.
It is included in the current version but you have to manually select it. It’s still in its early stages and still has a limited feature set.
The results are already very promising though. They look much more realistic and you can see a render preview inside the 3D view!
The performance is also much, much better. It uses the GPU for rendering (OpenCL/CUDA) which speeds things up significantly.
Experimental builds can be grabbed from http://www.graphicall.org. For the best performance select a build that has “Importance Sampling“. This reduced the render time and the amount of noise.

More or less a note-to-self, this is how you configure a texture node in Cycles (I couldn’t really find this anywhere):

which results in: