Ben Forta
Educator · Author · Lecturer · Technologist

Turning curiosity into skills,
and skills into careers.

Passionate educator. Sought-after speaker and lecturer. Author of 40+ books with over a million copies in print across 16 languages. Adobe's Senior Director of Education Initiatives.

Featured books

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Captain Code: Unleash Your Coding Superpower with Python

Captain Code: Unleash Your Coding Superpower with Python

The intro-to-coding for the young (aged 10-18 or so) and young-at-heart. Learn by creating and playing games, starting small, and rapidly becoming increasingly sophisticated. Creating these games will help you learn how to code, but that’s not enough. We’re also going to help you learn how to think like a coder, analyze problems like a coder, plan like a coder, progressively iterate like a coder, craft elegant solutions like a coder, even talk like a coder. Because becoming a coder is all fun and games! (Note: we've created top-secret extra resources for educators who are using this book in the classroom).

Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes (Fifth Edition)

The 5th edition of the best selling SQL book of all time, used by individuals, organizations, and as courseware by dozens of academic institutions the world over. Includes coverage of all major DBMSs.

Learning Regular Expressions

Regular expression are an incredibly powerful tool that can be used to perform all sorts of powerful text processing and manipulation in just about every language and on every platform. With this book, RegEx power is available to all.

Recent posts

Jul 29, 2026 EducationAI
AI in the Classroom, Part 3: Where It Actually Earns Its Place

From personalized instruction to removing the blank page for kids who've never had a way to show what's in their heads, this is where AI actually earns its place in the classroom, and why that matters most for the kids with the least.

Jul 28, 2026 EducationAI
AI in the Classroom, Part 2: The Fears, Real and Imagined

Cheating, plagiarism, screen time, equity, privacy: the fears about AI in schools are real, but most of them aren't new. AI didn't break education, it just shone a spotlight on problems that were already there.

Jul 27, 2026 EducationAI
AI in the Classroom, Part 1: What's Actually Happening Now

A room full of educators went quiet when I suggested assignments shouldn't have a word count. That reaction is the real subject of this post: the "well, this is how we've always done it" mindset that's slowing AI adoption in the classroom, and why it's worth pushing past, carefully.

Jul 1, 2026 ColdFusion
The ColdFusion Summit Welcome Video

Last week I presented a keynote at the Adobe ColdFusion Summit 2026. The team created this (admittedly somewhat over the top) intro video for me.

Jun 25, 2026 Education
So What's The Real Reason College Costs So Much?

What's behind the spiraling cost of higher education? Administrative bloat? Athletics spending? Fancy dorms? All of those are real. But they're symptoms, not the cause.

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By the numbers

40+
Books published
Beginner guides, step-by-step tutorials, reference manuals, a fun intro to coding designed specifically for the young (and young at heart), and the best-selling SQL series of all time — some of which have been translated into 16 languages
30+
Years teaching
Coding and robotics classroom teacher, youth mentor, sought-after speaker and lecturer, and technical author who has helped more than a million people develop their coding skills and discover new opportunities
1M+
Copies in print
Readers in offices, homes, and classrooms worldwide, and an important campus presence where titles have been adopted as computing textbooks in leading colleges and universities
2,000+
Presentations
Keynotes, speeches, lectures, and demos delivered at events and venues around the world (and approaching 5,000,000 miles flown in the process)