Everyone has an opinion on the right way to get baby to sleep through the night but you need to make your own decisions and you need to make them early on. Setting a routine and sticking to it is vital to encouraging your baby to sleep through the night, no matter what that routine actually is. This page isn't going to tell you which "expert" opinion is right, it's only here to offer a variety of information and advice that should apply no matter which approach you choose to take.
New babies generally don't sleep through the night until they have doubled their weight. In fact, new parents need more sleep then their newborn. Some parents prefer to have the cot in their room at first; reducing the disturbance when baby wakes in the night. Some will even want baby in their bed, though you should research the risks attached to that before you decide to have baby sleeping with you. Others choose to start as they mean to go on and have baby in baby's room. Whichever you choose, you need to expect to be woken often for the first days. Lack of sleep will put extra pressure on you and your relationships with your baby and your partner. Discuss this with your partner early on, establish a routine for who gets up when but be flexible; some nights one of you may be simply too exhausted to manage.
Even at this point, though, you can start to prepare the groundwork for sleep-filled nights -- for baby and for you. You need to begin to establish baby's nighttime routine right away. Always do the same things at the same time, keep things simple, make it clear (to baby and to you) that this is what happens when bedtime comes around. Perhaps start with a bath, then a song or story, then feeding, then bed. Lullabies can be especially important here; both as part of the routine and to calm a fussy baby. Have the same person do the same step each night. Share the responsibilities but keep the pre-bed period structured in the same way each night. Try to factor in some time for baby to fuss and demand more attention (that's perfectly natural) but have some finality to it so that, when baby is in bed, baby knows it's time to sleep.
The one thing that is guaranteed to get in the way of your perfectly planned, precisely executed bedtime routine is feeding. Until baby is sleeping through the night without needing to be fed, you can only lay the groundwork for this routine. You can use those nighttime feeds to cement the routine in both your own and baby's minds by repeating the latter steps each time you feed and put baby down again.
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