In Puerto Rico, all of the players are competing to build the "Best" city of Puerto Rico. To that effect, everyone gets their own personalized game board to play on, seen here.
The board is split up into 2 areas. On the top of the board is the City section, where all of your buildings will be built. On the bottom is an overview of the island, which has places for you to place the various plantation tiles that you will aquire during the game.
To make things easier, each board also contains a list of each role, what the action is during that role, and what the privelige is for the player that chooses the role.
The roles can be a bit confusing, so lets go over them in order.