Not to be too picky, but I think when the author refers to ‘number of samples’, he means ‘sample size’. One sample, one or more observations.
This is neither here nor there: I was reading the about page of the author, and it contains a passage that slightly confused me: "My name is Chris and I live in Sweden. I have a beautiful, supportive wife whose love I will never be able to requite, neither in degree nor kind." English isn't my first language, how should the second sentence be interpreted?
Unless I'm mistaken, this uses "standard deviation" to refer to standard error throughout. They differ by a factor of sqrt(num_samples).
This is actually much more commonly useful than the t distribution, in my experience. You can squint at a histogram (or some summary stats), eyeball the stdev, approximate the stderr in your head, and get a pretty good sense of confidence.
I most often find myself doing this for the Bernoulli distribution, where it's also handy to know that the stdev is sqrt(p(1-p)), or "about 1/2 if p is middling, or sqrt(p) when it's small" (and you can flip the polarity to handle p→1).