Presentation Patterns

by Nathaniel Schutta, Neal Ford

Released March 2016

Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.

ISBN: 9781491954980

Start your free trial

Video description

You’re giving a talk on a subject you know inside and out and your audience is staring at their cell phones. You’re boring your audience. Maybe you could use some help. In this fast paced humorous video, presentation pros Neal Ford and Nathaniel Schutta provide that help. They’ve spent thousands of hours giving talks at seminars around the world and even more hours listening to bad ones. They’ve used this experience to de-construct “The Presentation” into a set of patterns and anti-patterns. What are patterns and anti-patterns? They’re simply names (often funny ones) for the building blocks of good presentation practices (patterns) and the stumbling blocks of bad ones (anti-patterns). Ford and Schutta offer concrete instruction in how to plan your presentation, handle a wide variety of presentation types, manage your audiences, and deal with constraints and surprises. They show you what to do, and perhaps more importantly, what not to.

Learn great recipes for building and delivering effective presentations
Explore creativity patterns (narrative arc, triad, talklet) that frame and inspire presentations
Discover how presentation tools (like PowerPoint) can seduce you into doing bad things
Pick up patterns that can thrill your audience: Composite animation and make it rain
Learn why hiccup words, laser weapons, and bunkers drive audiences to the snack stands
Discover the Carnegie Hall, posse, and lipsync patterns that keep you calm while you speak

Neal Ford is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. He has spoken at over 200 developers conferences and presented more than 2000 talks over the last decade.

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a senior software engineer focused on making usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written two books on Ajax and speaks regularly at various No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, universities, and Java user groups.