[Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet] georgia boy:
I'm fairly new at this also, got my 16G NT (1.4.1) a couple days ago, and I'll tell you what I did. At first, I rooted it because I wanted (at least) access to the Kindle reader, but the google market/play is not available so B&N could control it. Rooting AND installing google apps (aka gapps) give you the market and more. From there you can install the go launcher and have a pretty nice overlay that looks ICS-like. Here's what I used and it seemed to go pretty smooth:

Part 1:

This thread by the developer Indirect shows how to do the root along with gaaps:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1466583

And here is an invaluable video from albertwertz that goes along with it. This helped me get the confidence to do it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I403bagL9rw

He has an update to this show at the beginning of the video, but I did not use that.

The secret sauce is in making a bootable SD card with both the image that gives you CWM (clockworks mod), which is basically a loader that allow you to then load the .zip file which contains the root and gapps files.

After I went through the process, nothing seemed to have changed at all on the NT, but after some head scratching I realized that gapps is the key and it had in fact been loaded. So hit the home button and then search and type in market. Voila, the google market is now there and you can download anything that is compatible with the NT (like kindle and the go launcher).

Part 2.

The go launcher is great, but everytime I hit home, I had to navigate to the go launcher and launch the nicer ics-like skin, so I decided to go for CM9. I'm not at all disappointed that I did. Netflix does not work, but seemingly everything else does and does nicely. Here's how:

Basically, you just need to get the CM9.003 file, and "flash" that just as you flashed the root and google apps zip. I'm sure you have figured out by now that flashing just means loading the new program into "flash" memory, which is just a read/write memory that is non-volatile. (does not erase at power down).

What I wound up up doing is placing the CM9 zip file on a separate SD card, then used the one I originally used for rooting to get into the CWM recovery program. Once there, pop it out and insert the CM9 zip and run that one from CWM. Reboot and you're running Android 4.0.4.

Here's the link for the CM9 install, courtesy of developer chrmhoffmann:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1534192

Here's a link to the CM9 zip:

http://goo.im/devs/chrmhoffmann/cm9/update-cm9-acclaim-alpha0.03-fullofbugs.zip

One more thing: You actually should put two zips on that 2nd SD, the 2nd one being google apps (aka gapps), as for some reason it is not included in the CM9 zip as it was in step 1. Here's the link to that file:

http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/wiki/Latest_Version/Google_Apps

It's the app for CM9, and just in case, here's the download link:

http://cmw.22aaf3.com/gapps/gapps-ics-20120317-signed.zip

So now you have 2 zips on the 2nd SD card. Run them both, first the CM9 zip and then the gapps zip, reboot.

Sorry that's so long, but that's what I did and it worked out well for me once I figured it out...

---------- Post added at 04:13 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:07 PM ----------

One more thing. When you get into the CWM recovery program (the one you'll see when you boot from the 1st SD card, don't forget to run a backup of the original ROM, IE the factory version in case you want to go back.

I'm not an expert on the backup and recover process, and there apparently other ways to restore to the original NT 1.4.0 or 1.4.1, but I would do that anyway...