About
About Ben Forta
I am Adobe‘s Senior Director of Education Initiatives. My primary responsibility is a focus on students (primarily K-12 but some higher-ed) with an eye towards digital and visual literacy, and the role that Adobe services and tools play in the future of communication and storytelling. I get to spend a considerable amount of time teaching, talking, and writing about Adobe products, and providing feedback to help shape the future direction of the products.
I am also an author, with over a million books in print. I’ve written on SQL (including the best-selling SQL book of all time), classroom creativity with Adobe Spark, Python, Regular Expressions, ColdFusion, Windows development, JSP, and more. My books page has details on these, many of which have been translated into 16 languages. And I have new books on the way – stay tuned for more info.
And I’ve been teaching for over 30 years. Via my books, lectures, and videos, I have had the privilege of teaching coding skills to over a million people worldwide. And, when I have the time, I lead a local high-school coding and robotics program.
Before joining Adobe (well, Allaire actually, and then Macromedia and Allaire merged, and then Adobe bought Macromedia, I get acquired for a living) I helped found a company called Car.com which provides automotive services (buy a car, sell a car, etc.) all online. Car.com (including Stoneage) became one of the largest automotive web sites out there, was written entirely in ColdFusion, and is now owned by AutoWeb (Auto-By-Tel).
I now live in Oak Park, MI. Before moving to the Midwest, I lived in London, England (I was born there) and in New York and California.
Here is my Amazon.com wishlist.
There, now you know more about me than you probably ever wanted to know.
On The Road
I spend way too much time on the road – and have the pictures to prove it (well, some of them). In case you have nothing else to do with your time, here is some of the recent evidence.
Contact Me
The best way to contact me is via e-mail. I do respond to all e-mail, although sometimes it does take me a little while to do so. My e-mail address is ben@forta.com.