Upgrading from Joomla 1.5RC4 to Stable (Production) was a breeze. There was no need to make changes to database structure or anything. Simply download the full stable release, upload to my server, and overwrite the files. Here's how I did it from the shell.

Navigate to the proper directory:
$ cd /mysite/

Download (wget) the new compressed file:
$ wget http://joomlacode.org/gf/download/frsrelease/5078/21064/Joomla-1.5.0.tar.gz

Uncompress over old files:
$ tar -zxvf Joomla-1.5.0.tar.gz

Remove the installation directory:
$ rm -fR installation

I then visited the site to check to make sure everything was working. Sure enough, it all worked great! I would highly recommed creating a backup of your site files and database. Here are some links from my site on how to do this from the shell:

Create a MySQL Backup from Shell
Create file/website backup from Shell

The following is a short code snippet on how to view which MySQL databases are available for a user, then a command to back them up. This should work on Unix and Linux variants.

To view what databases are available to be backed up, run the following command:
$ mysql -u root -h localhost -p -Bse 'show databases'

To backup each database, run the following command:
$ mysqldump -u root -h localhost -pmypassword databasename | gzip -9 > faqs-db.sql.gz

There was a very small issue with the DS-Syndicate module that broke the W3C Validation compliance. The img tag did not end with a forward slash. To fix this, simply open /modules/mod_ds-syndicate.php and on line 51, column 64 add a / to the end of the <img> tag so the line looks like:

$mod_content .= "<img src="/" . $feed_img . "" alt="feed image"/></a>";

I had about a 45 minute conversation with one of my Coworkers, Troy, about my webiste yesterday. I asked him to tell me three things he liked about the site and 3 he didn't. The three things he liked about the site were harder for him to come up with than I expected it to be, but he didn't have much trouble coming up with some suggestions. I really appreciate it when people give me creative criticism as that's one of the only way to make things better. Attached below is the shorthand notation of what he told me: