I've read many a programming tutorial and if you've read some, you'll agree that the great majority of them suck. They all just try to tell you what a variable or loop is written in that particular language and that may be useful information for some people, some of us would like a little more contextual relevance. I love tutorials that actually write a program and explain things along the way. This way you get to write a real program, which may or may not be useful to you, and learn how things are really done in that language. This is especially useful if you're treading unfamiliar waters such as learning GUI programming when you're accustomed to CLI programming or learning game programming when you're used to writing database programs.

I've been learning C# lately, just out of the need to know Windows programming so I can make myself more marketable in the job market. I have been following this tutorial which walks you through creating a game in C#. Sure, knowing how to write a game is completely useless in the IT world but this particular tutorial walks you through the Microsoft way of coding C#. It explains and gives examples and hands on exercises with methods (aka functions), classes, AI, polymorphic programming, arrays, and more. This is how a tutorial should be written. Not only is it very informative and comprehensive, its also interesting and rather fun. It really helps when learning a new language to have a) a definite goal and b) an interesting instructor/learning aid.

I'm constantly on the lookout for tutorials of any programming language that follows this archetype. If you know of any, please let me know in the comments.