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I haven't been a DPS in a very long time, but Katy asked for basic tips and I'm providing a few. Others can chime in with other basics!

There are four major keys to DPS. In order of importance, they're: Stay Alive, Do Your Rotation/Priority List, Keep your Buffs Up, and Move Properly.

Stay Alive

This one depends on the fight, but as we always say, if you're dead you do zero dps. The two keys here are threat management and knowing the fight.

Do Your Rotation/Priority List

You don't have to be perfect. A missed button will cost you a little DPS. The biggest crime here is not pressing a button - just like being dead, not pressing a button or leaving a gap between your spells/abilities means 0 damage done. Knowing your proper rotation intellectually is one thing. Actually doing it under duress is another, and when in doubt, just hit your filler spell/ability until you have your bearings back.

Keep Your Buffs Up

Asking for Kings is one thing, and it's easy enough to do. But always remember food and flasks and, if applicable, things like haste potions/etc. Those account for a significant chunk of your damage, and there are going to be times when squeezing out that 300 or so dps from using your consumables properly is going to be the difference between victory and defeat. Our Rotface kill last night had two people alive, and everyone was flasked - if we hadn't been flasked, we would have all died. Food, flask, class things like flametongue weapon/spellstone/poisons/aspects/etc., you need to make sure everything is working for you. Don't look at other people for buffs until you're sure you have all of your own. There are mods that will check this for you!

Move Properly

Backing away is never the right answer to anything, with the notable exception of certain times when you're kiting a mob that is moving at half speed. However, the only people who should be doing that are tanks, so don't worry about backing up ever. Turn around with your mouse (keyboard turning is bad, mm-kay? You'll lose a lot of valuable time if you keyboard turn) and RUN. Strafe if you want to, it's just as fast as running forward, but again, strafing is a technique that tanks need to worry about more often than you do. When you need to run, just run! If you have any instant cast spells, they can be used as filler while you attack so that you are at least squeaking out some damage when you're moving. Look at Fiddletwix's logs some time - he squeezes in a fireblast or two during movement phases, and that contributes some valuable damage during a valley in raid DPS.

Those are my basic tips. If anyone has specific questions, answer them here, but I'm no DPS guru - I just tank. And heal. And set things on fire sometimes.

Strafing is actually pretty important to DPS as well. Since we need to be facing the target to cast, strafing does that for us. On fights with mobility I always refresh my flameshock while strafing during the movement bits.

For people who get lost in their rotation under duress, proper organization of your hotbar will help with dps. That way if you are not sure about what ability you should be using next, you can just roll your fingers across 1-4 and something will get cast.

Another thing to know about is when to blow your cooldowns. Haste adding cooldowns should be used right away so they will come up again during the later part of the fight, or during stress moments where there will not be heroism (green slimes on Putricide etc.) Damage or crit enhancing cooldowns should be timed to coincide with heroism so they can be applied to the most hits possible.

Current ICC heroism timing:
Marrowgar : 5 seconds into fight
Deathwhisper: Start of phase 2
Gunship: No heroism
Saurfang Jr. : Frenzy at about 30% health left. So there is time to pop abilities with 2 minute cooldowns at the start of this fight.
Rotface : After first slime spit
Festergut: 5 seconds into fight
Dr. Putricide : Start of phase 3, but your personal cooldowns should probably be used on the 2nd green slime.

Now for a melee (though not exclusive to melee) perspective! Movement is important, as is being able to hit some abilities while on the move. Caps incoming: SITUATIONAL AWARENESS i.e. paying attention, and thus knowing when to move, where to move to, and whether or not to finish your cast or do something else. Much as I disliked pvp and arenas, being a Holy Shockadin in the arena was good practice on situations being constantly irregular. It was mostly movement and then recognizing that you're in a place where you can start chain-casting something that's not instant. Boss fights are usually the opposite, where you get more time to chain-cast stuff, but Awareness, Reaction, Mobility are key- it's all about staying alive. And even beyond reacting to things happening, is thinking ahead- there will be certain events that you know will happen, and you will have to move someplace, so think about being ready to move and where to go. If you're alive, you will continue to heal/dps. You need to figure out how to stay alive. Ok, enough about that.

Buffs/Debuffs: imo, getting buffed up before a fight is pre-fight stuff. Let's just assume that we get our buffs, and focus on the important part: the boss fight. It is terribly important to notice when your procs fire (instant casting, free spells, whatever), so that you can react to those events and make use of it. That's Awareness again! There are multiple mods or configurations of ones you already have to keep track of your personal buffs, and also debuffs on the boss which you try to keep from falling off. If you have Elkano's BuffBars (which consolidates and organizes all the buff/debuff icons and timers), it can be configured to put procs separately, target debuffs (though it doesn't know yours from others) separately, and all by specific buff/debuff names, so that you only have to watch what you care about. Other people use Quartz (?) for watching certain things, but I've gotten to like EventHorizon (though no longer updated, still works). I have a thread about UI mods and such here with picture. In summary, keeping up your buffs/debuffs is important, and there are mods to assist in keeping you aware of the status of things.

Always be pressing something. Unless you're running for your life, in which case juggle the priorities of 'stay alive' with 'can I do that and still shoot off this instant cast?'. I try to fire off my instants if I can while running, and remember forward doesn't have to be permanent move, it just has to be faster than the alternative at getting you out of fire. My 'fire, crap, run' strat is usually hold down both mouse buttons to run and get the frak out of there, that way I still have my left hand free for firing instants without sacrificing speed by using the keyboard to move/turn.

To be waiting for your good abilities to refresh while the not so good damage ones are not on cooldown is bad. If Explosive shot, Black arrow, aimed/multi are down I'm using steady, even if one of the others is almost up the wasted time doing nothing is still bad. I also try to spam the attacks a bit, the anti-lag measures mean that you can't just go by 'oh, my cast has finished, what can I press now', not if you have over 200ms lag - you will be able to start casting a bit earlier.

Most classes have a priority queue or rotation, you can usually find a good one on the elitist jerk forums. You don't need to read all that stuff, I don't, I just don't have the degree in math to understand some of the stuff posted there but a bit of search can usually turn up a 'and this is what that means to you ordinary mortals when it comes to playing the game' post or two. If you're strapped for time find someone with a good setup and copy them - and make sure you get their rotation/priority queue too. Nothing's as good as doing your own research, but in a pinch it's better than blind guesses (it's what I do with alts, find someone who's good at that class, copy their spec and glyphs and then either ask them or do a google search for that class/spec rotation).

Situational awareness has already been touched upon. I'll just stress it, it really is important. And if you're not too good at that, Deadly Boss Mods is quite good at yelling at you to move if you are getting hit by bad things. That still leaves a lot of things that you need to look out for, but it does reduce the number of things by a bit and helps quite a lot. I don't know in what kind of view people usually play, but I'm almost always zoomed out quite a bit with an almost isometric view so that I can see safe spots, bad spots, and soon to be very bad spots easier. On some fights like the twin valks (you never know if a new fight will be like that) fight it's very helpful to have a top down camera view so you can see even more accurately where everything is and exactly where it's heading.

Edit: Lastly remember Kumisha's credo: Everything counts (in large amounts). Small upgrades like expendables, enchants, gems and so on add up over time.