Partitioning is really up to the user. IMHO, this is how I would set up the guidelines:

Newbies:
It's simply much easier to have just 2 partitions: root and swap.

Intermediate to expert:
This group may be the most variable, some would start splitting more partitions for more security and/or reliability.
The basic reliable option: you start out with at least 3 partitions, root, /home, and swap.
Some would add /var for slightly increased security.
Some might include /usr and /tmp partitions as well but I feel this might be a bit overboard. Note /usr uses the most space as it houses all of the binaries so therefore you would allocate the most space to this paritition.

Experts, Gurus, and Linux Masters:
This group would probably have a partition for every slice in the linux userland.

As for me, I use a basic 4 partition scheme: root, /home, /var, and swap with /tmp linked to the /var partition. Having a separate /var partition increases security in case you get rooted, and once it fills up, it won't take out the rest of the linux installation. Having a separate /home is important for saving your data, especially in the event you would have to reinstall linux. I don't bother with a separate /usr partition because the binaries change all the time when you do upgrading anyway. You could also have /etc as a small separate partition because it holds all of your scripts, especially your carefully handcrafted scripts.

Let's assume you have a 10 GB hard disk, here's what I would suggest:

root- 4.5 GB
/home- 4 GB
/var- 1 GB
swap- 512MB

As you can see, that's pretty small, but it's fairly distributed enough that you have room to upgrade and download things. If you have a larger disk, you would give more weight to the root and home partitions while keeping var and swap the same so you'll have more room to grow for a much, much longer period of time. Also, you might want to move swap to the end of the disk, as you're not going to expand that anyway.

HTH,

Durand