Motif is a library of routines that makes the programming of user interfaces in an Xwindows environment fairly easy and straight-forward. The Motif libraries handle a lot of the low level Xwindows junk for you, so that you are able to create nice-looking and sophisticated interfaces without having to contend with the all of the complexity of X. But because Motif is built on top of Xwindows, and because Xwindows is a detailed and complicated environment, Motif is for many an intimidating, difficult-to-learn programming system. Many people try to learn it - they enter "the pit", the "Xwindows swamp", so to speak - and get extremely frustrated by the complexity.
OK, maybe it isn't quite that bad. But programming in Motif and Xwindows is fairly complicated, and tends to get on a lot of people's nerves when they first get started. The purpose of these tutorials is to ease you into Motif programming as smoothly and as quickly as possible, despite the complexity and problems associated with the environment. It really isn't that hard to get started, as long as you concentrate only on the essentials at first. Once you know the essentials, then the rest can be added incrementally over time.
There are several excellent books on the market that try to help you learn motif: one in particular is by Douglas Young. The problem with all of them though is that they start off assuming you already know a huge amount of stuff about XWindows. When I first dove into Young's book, I found it started about 10 levels over my head, even though I've been writing event driven programs on a Macintosh for years, and had a lot of Unix experience outside of the Xwindows realm.
That's where these tutorials come in. They are sort of a "Motif 101". They will get you going in Motif, starting from a much lower level of knowledge than Young assumes. They cover the essentials, one step at a time, on the assumption that if you know the basics, the rest will come easily with time. [I am specifically targeting these tutorials at college undergraduates at North Carolina State University. These students know C and Unix, but probably haven't done much programming in event-driven environments.] Once through with the tutorials, you should be able to use Young's book to refine your knowledge, and from there move up into the big leagues. Kind of reminds me of the farm system for baseball, in a way.