tar -zcf ~/`basename `pwd“.`date +%F`.tar.gz ./*

Those are backquotes, which are bash’s way of giving you the result of some other shell command. It works like this:

`pwd` => the present working directory.
`basename …. ` => strips off the leading dirs, leaving you with only the final part of the dir name.
`date +%F` => prints the date with dashes, as yyyy-mm-dd
-zcf => creates the file as a prezipped tarball
./* => everything in this directory.