Not all tutorials are aimed for people that know nothing about programming. Many are intended for an audience that knows programming in a different language quite well but doesn't know a lot (or nothing) about the new language (in this case Lua).
For this kind of people it would be a waste of space to bring lots of "practical" examples, if this doesn't show a unique feature of the language, since people often know the algorithms quite well. If you want to learn about that you better get a tutorial/book about algorithms.
What they don't know is the topics that are specific to the programming language. IMHO it is right that many tutorials concentrate on this.
For this kind of people it would be a waste of space to bring lots of "practical" examples, if this doesn't show a unique feature of the language, since people often know the algorithms quite well. If you want to learn about that you better get a tutorial/book about algorithms.
What they don't know is the topics that are specific to the programming language. IMHO it is right that many tutorials concentrate on this.