This comes from this Harvard Business Review post.
The piece that caught my eye was this part of the article:
He was painfully shy. His English was halting. When he tried to describe his invention, the sentences tumbled out incoherently.
The quote above describes several software developers I know, downright to the (for other, "normal" people) halting English.
The story is about a twelve-year-old Masai boy, Richard, who gave a TED speech about his invention to protect cows from nightly attacks from lions. He is the painfully shy "he" quoted above who ended up presenting at TED (over a thousand people in the audience, in an imposing setting).
The article is worth reading even if you are not giving presentations to such large audiences because most large software products today are (as expected) developed by large groups.
If you want to lead the group into some direction (for example, convince everyone to use Gerrit for code reviews), you will need presentation skills.
Perhaps not at the level of a TED presentation, but it won't hurt to get tips for the worst case scenario.
Herb Sutter is active again with his GoTW columns. He has been for a few weeks now.
The latest one is about using unique_ptr to clearly define ownership of pointers. See it here. From there you can jump to his main page and explore other columns.
unique_ptr replaces auto_ptr. This latest column is a great introduction to it, if you grew up with auto_ptr (as I did) and need to understand why it is better to move on to unique_ptr now.
If you never heard of Herb Sutter before, a good place to start is his C++ Coding Standards book. It's a gentle introduction to good C++ practices.
From there you can move on to Exceptional C++ and More Exceptional C++ books. They are denser reads than the Coding Standards book, but well worth the time. They are nicely structured around relatively short chapters. Some of the chapters build on top of the previous one, so it makes more sense to read the chapters in the sequence they are presented in the book.
I learned a lot about C++ with these books. One of the best investments of time I did for C++.
