Ryan Benedetti

Who is Ryan Benedetti ?

Author, web developer, database administrator, web designer

Portland, Oregon

Areas of Expertise:

• jQuery
• JavaScript
• Ruby
• PHP
• Java
• MySQL
• CSS
• HTML5

• Photoshop
• Flash Animation
• ActionScript
• Consulting
• Speaking
• Programming
• Training
• Writing

Biography:

Ryan Benedetti works as a Web Developer for the University of Portland. He works with jQuery, JavaScript, Java, Ruby, PHP, Liferay Portal, Drupal, and Apache's Jakarta Velocity Templating language.

For seven years, Ryan served as Department Head for Information Technology and Computer Engineering at Salish Kootenai College, on a team that created an NSF-funded four-year Bachelor of Science in Information Technology program and Science, Tech, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) camps for eighth to twelfth graders.

Prior to that, he worked as editor, web database developer, and information systems specialist for a river, stream, and wetland research program in the School of Forestry at the University of Montana.

One of Ryan's greatest passions is teaching and training coding and other technology to new learners. He volunteers in Portland schools to teach code and technology skills to kids.

Ryan holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Montana and his poems have been published in Cut Bank and Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse. He spends his free hours painting, cartooning, playing blues harmonica, making learning toys, and practicing zazen. He spends his best moments with his daughter, his son, and his sweetheart, Shonna, in Portland, OR.

You can view Ryan's daily art blog at http://bendedyeti.tumblr.com

Praise:

"The book is well-suited to beginner-intermediates hoping to learn jQuery. It is easy to read, and the more unconventional approach will appeal to some people much more so than the typical dryly written programming book. The exercises really help a lot and are well-conceived. " --Michael Erb, Amazon.com

"The book is written to be both entertaining and informative, in a style that engages the reader. In other words, it’s specifically designed not to be boring, and to get the reader interested in learning, effortlessly. (I found myself wishing that the textbook I used in my Networking class in college had been written like this. Think how much more I would have learned!)." --Marte Brengle

"This is 500, concise, tightly paced, easy to follow pages of goodness. Highly recommended." --Leo Marihart, BrianScratch

"Head First jQuery does an excellent job in laying the foundation for how interactive Web pages work and why jQuery should play an important part in your development toolkit....=If you haven’t yet stepped into the jQuery waters, or if you feel like you’re missing a lot of the foundation for what you’re doing, this book will put you on the right track." --Thomas Duff, LotusUserGroup.org, Dev Tips, September 2011

"If computer networking is providing a systems challenge and you're making the journey from junior network admin to expert, Head First Networking is for you. " --James A. Cox, California Bookwatch: The Computer Shelf

"I really enjoyed reading this book. I would even go so far as to say that this should be the first book about networking for anybody. Although this is a book for beginners, even seasoned professionals can enjoy it - at the very least to learn a different, less technical way of explaining things to novices. It may not look like much at first glance, but it does what it set out to do: it teaches you the ins and outs of networking, and makes that knowledge stick. " --Zeljka Zorz, Help Net Security

"This book teaches the underlying principles of modern computer networking and teaches them well. " --Ira Laefsky, Amazon.com