Rodnay Zaks is a French-born American author of many books on computer programming, including the seminal Programming the Z80 and Programming the 6502

MOS Technology 6502

The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch for MOS Technology in 1975. When it was introduced, it was the least expensive full-featured microprocessor on the market by a considerable margin, costing less than one-sixth the price of...

. He is the founder of independent computer books publisher Sybex and was its president and CEO until it was bought out by John Wiley and Sons in May 2005.

Zaks has an engineering degree from the École Centrale Paris

École Centrale Paris

École Centrale Paris is a French university-level institution in the field of engineering. It is also known by its original name École centrale des arts et manufactures, or ECP. Founded in 1829, it is one of the oldest and most prestigious engineering schools in France and has the special status...

 and a Master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, where he also was the third person to receive a Ph.D. from the then new Computer Science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 department. He started a career in training engineers and managers in the then new microprocessor

Microprocessor

A microprocessor incorporates the functions of a computer's central processing unit on a single integrated circuit, or at most a few integrated circuits. It is a multipurpose, programmable device that accepts digital data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and...

 technology and subsequently founded Sybex in 1976.

Zaks has been a director of ACM

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

's Special Interest Group on Microarchitecture (SIGMICRO) and founder of the non-profit organization EUROMICRO

EUROMICRO

EUROMICRO is an international scientific, engineering and educational organization dedicated to advancing the arts, sciences and applications of information technology and microelectronics...

.

An early publication of Zaks' from Sybex was A microprogrammed APL implementation which is the complete, total source listing for the microcode for a Digital Scientific Corporation Meta 4 microprogrammable processor implementing the APL programming language.

Early Publications

• "Microprogrammed APL," R.Zaks, Fifth IEEE Computer Conference Proceedings, Sep. 1971 p 193

• "A Microprogrammed APL Implementation," R. Zaks Ph. D. Thesis, University of California, Berkeley, June 1972.

• "A Firmware APL Time Sharing System", R. Zaks D. Steingart, J. Moore, SJCC 71, AFIPS Proceedings, Vol. 38, AFIPS Press, May 1971, pp 179–180.
• "Second Euromicro Symposium on Microprocessing and Microprogramming, October 12–14, 1976, Venice : [papers] / " Euromicro Symposium on Microprocessing and Microprogramming (2nd : 1976 : Venice, Italy) | 1977. | text

• "Microcomputer architectures: Third EUROMICRO Symposium on Microprocessing and Microprogramming, October 3–6, 1977, Amsterdam : preprints / " Euromicro Symposium on Microprocessing and Microprogramming (3rd : 1977 : Amsterdam, Netherlands) | 1977. | text

• "Workshop on the microarchitecture of computer systems, June 23–25, 1975, Nice / " Workshop on the Microarchitecture of Computer Systems, Nice, 1975. | 1975. | text

External links

• Sybex site