I just watched a nice presentation by Yahoo evangelist Christian Heilmann who opened the show at FF09 yesterday. Whilst there’s a lot of good ideas throughout regarding the maintainability of JavaScript code, one nugget stood out about code tutorials. Christian Suggests a four pronged presentation strategy when writing tutorials for designers – it is equally valid when presenting concepts to fresh geeks:

1. Say what it does.
2. Show a working example.
3. Include the full code of the example.
4. Explain the example using code chunks interspersed with descriptive paragraphs.

A simple & sensible blueprint!