Rodnay Zaks

Who is Rodnay Zaks?

Rodnay Zaks is a French-born American author of many books on computer programming, including the seminal Programming the Z80 and Programming the 6502. 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 and a Master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where he also was the third person to receive a Ph.D. from the then new Computer Science department. He started a career in training engineers and managers in the then new microprocessor technology and subsequently founded Sybex in 1976.

Zaks has been a director of ACM's Special Interest Group on Microarchitecture and founder of the non-profit organization EUROMICRO.

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.