Compressing ginormous files

I know most of my fellow linux coworkers already know this trick but since I am fairly new to linux and I know others are I am going to show how one can compress ginormous (quote from the movie "Elf") files.

First run: tar -cf filename.tar /directory/*
Then for best compression run: gzip -9 filename.tar

The to uncompress the file run: tar -xzvf filename.tar.gz