How to 301 redirect properly?

[lata21]

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link equity (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website.
301 Redirects in Apache
Problem:
Back when we launched our first website, seomoz.org, it was hosted at <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.socengine.com/seo/">http://www.socengine.com/seo/</a><!-- m --> rather than on its own domain. When the original developers were moving seomoz.org to its own dedicated server, they wanted it to be accessed as its own domain rather than as a subdirectory of socengine.com. They needed visitors accessing anything in <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.socengine.com/seo/">http://www.socengine.com/seo/</a><!-- m --> to be redirected to <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.seomoz.org">http://www.seomoz.org</a><!-- m -->. The redirection had to accommodate several file and folder name changes and had to be done with 301 redirects in order to be search engine-friendly. They also needed to forward <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://seomoz.org">http://seomoz.org</a><!-- m -->, too, for aesthetic purposes and to avoid canonicalization errors.

Solution:
The simplest approach to do this would have been to add 301 redirects to the PHP code that powered seomoz.org using PHP's header function. Utilizing the power of the apache module mod_rewrite, however, the developers realized they could match specific patterns for entire folders and redirect them to their new URLs without having to go through every PHP script.

Can give me a tutorial or something like that to do it properly?

That will be extremely helpful.