For starters, you must stop using your Mac immediately! The more you use it, the more likely the now free space will be overwritten by new data, making recovery anywhere from difficult to impossible.
You're going to need a few things to recover the data:
1) An external hard drive you can install OS X to so you have some other drive to startup to.
2) Once you have purchased an external drive, restart your Mac and hold the Command+R keys to startup in Recovery mode. Launch Disk Utility and partition the new external drive as GUID, and then format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
3) Now that the external drive is ready to hold a Mac OS, quit Disk Utility (you're still in Recovery Mode), and install OS X to the external drive. Be very careful not to choose the internal drive. You don't want to write to it.
4) Restart and boot to the external drive. Actually, when you're done installing OS X to the external, the Mac should restart to it.
5) Purchase either FileSalvage or Data Rescue III and install it to the external drive, which should also be your startup drive for the moment.
6) Run the recovery app and do a full search for deleted files on the internal drive. Choose the external drive as the location to save the recovered data to.