This is the current configuration I use across my machines for XMonad. It is written in a modular way and uses the machine's hostname to differentiate various per machine settings (such as workspace names, hooks, etc).
Required is xmonad and xmonad-contrib (contrib is included in some distro
packages for xmonad). dzen2 and some conky (conky-cli works) are needed for
the status bars. Additionally, unclutter and xcompmgr are two things I use to
improve the experience but will not break the experience if missing.
There is an included setup.sh script that will try to setup the system with my
other configuration sets. This will install the required packages for either
Ubuntu or Arch and symlink the needed files. There is an environment file that
should be imported into .xinitrc to tell it things to start for xmonad, this is
specific to my system, tailor it to how you do it yourself.