Introduction to Beamer presentations

I just started using Beamer, which is a document class for creating presentations using LaTeX. I installed Beamer in Ubuntu Linux using the Synaptic package manager, and found the user guide located in /usr/share/doc/latex-beamer, along with a set of useful templates. The user guide is massive and although it probably contains everything there is to know about Beamer, I searched the web for some quick introdutions:

A Beamer Quickstart is a very good starting point for Beamer - it both contains the essential "hello world" code for a bare-bones presentation, plus a lot of details on how to customize your presentation.

Sylvia Blaho at my very own University of Tromsø has also made a nice introduction to Beamer, as a Beamer presentation, of course.

Beamer comes with a set of themes and color layouts, and this Beamer Theme Matrix shows examples of every possible combination of these. Very useful for finding your favorite theme. Note that the .sty files for all the themes are located in /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/beamer/themes.

There are also a lot of people making their own Beamer themes. This webpage has a list of several such themes made, among them the beautiful Torino theme and an unoffcial but really nice theme for Uppsala University.