I totally agree with strykeroz,
http://bildr.org/2011/08/74hc595-breakout-arduino/
Code
Because it is so much easier to use a lot of these now, we wanted the code to be the same. So we made an Arduino library that is capable of controlling near 2000 of these chained together and still enable you to call each pin individually. (this library can be used with the plain 74hc959[typo - spc] chip as well)